The SystemCore is based on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 with a 16 GB eMMC (which formats to about 14.5 GB). The firmware image extracts to 10 GB but this only covers the partition layout, not the full eMMC – the remaining space is unpartitioned. Considering that the original zip file is only 1.8 GB there is likely quite a bit of empty / wasted space within the partitions. It is interesting that they didn’t choose to go the auto expanding route but I’m guessing they did this for ease of use.

There is an A and B partition which is used by the limelight_updatemanager to atomically update the system preventing broken updates from bricking the system which is quite nice. This is done at the kernel level with the tryboot_a_b flag.

The system is based on the 6.6.64-rt47-v8-16k (PREEMPT_RT real-time) kernel and appears to be entirely custom built using buildroot and does not contain any standard package managers aside from the custom ui one that is supposed to allow for install of Elastic and other tools in the future.

The CM5 carrier board has 5 can FD buses running on MCP2518FD controllers all running on 40Mhz oscillators via SPI. There was a comment in the device tree config # BETA SYSTEMCORE: CAN2 on SPI3 (MOSI=6, MISO=5, CLK=7, CS=27, INT=9) so I’m not sure if this is the final layout of the offical release this fall. All of the controllers are configured to run at 1Mbps CAN FD with txqueuelen=1000.

There are two different usb network interfaces with the ECM one for linux/macOS and the RNDIS for windows both exposed via usb gadget mode. Interestingly the can buses also show up here.

Services

Now for the interesting part. There are 18 systemd services on the image and I tried to rougly split them up by type.

MrcCommDaemon

The MrcCommDaemon (4.5MB, stripped aarch64) is kind of the main program. This is the DS communication daemon - it runs the NT4 server on port 5812, handles the UDP control packet protocol, publishes robot state, and subscribes to DS commands. It’s the equivalent of the NI FRC NetworkTables server on a roboRIO, except it also speaks the DS control protocol directly.

The most interesting discovery here is the topic namespace split. On the DS side, everything is published under /Dscomm/ (e.g. /Dscomm/Control/Enabled, /Dscomm/Status/BatteryVoltage). But on the robot side, MrcCommDaemon publishes the same logical data under /Netcomm/ (e.g. /Netcomm/Control/Enabled, /Netcomm/Status/BatteryVoltage). The daemon acts as a bridge between the two - translating between DS UDP packets and NT4 topics with the appropriate prefix. This was discovered due to some rev work that will :tw_hand_with_index_and_middle_fingers_crossed: hopefully get published soon.

It also reads CTRE device status from a custom kernel module at /sys/kernel/can_heartbeat/controldata and system telemetry from /sys/cpu, /sys/battery, /sys/ram, and /sys/storage.

CAN Bus Stack

Five services manage the CAN FD buses:

The CAN bus setup script is also interesting it sleeps 4 seconds for some reason, then brings up all five interfaces:

sleep 4 && \
  ip link set can_s0 type can bitrate 1000000 && \
  ip link set can_s0 txqueuelen 1000 && ip link set can_s0 up && \
  # ... repeated for can_s1 through can_s4 ...
  modprobe can_heartbeat && modprobe i2c-dev

The sniffer on port 5800 is going to be really fun to play with you can connect from a browser and watch CAN traffic in real time. The can_heartbeat kernel module is custom out-of-tree and bridges CAN data to sysfs for MrcCommDaemon to read.

Networking

The networking is surprisingly complex but does make sense. USB gadget mode provides two virtual network interfaces to the DS simultaneously - ECM for macOS/Linux and RNDIS for Windows - over the same USB connection. Each has its own DHCP range subnetted by team number (16 subnets of 11 addresses each). The WiFi AP runs a separate dnsmasq instance with DNS completely disabled (port=0).

The irqconf.sh script is interesting as it finds eth0’s interrupt and sets smp_affinity to core 2 which should help with deterministic network processing.

The WiFi AP config is also interesting. It uses 5GHz 802.11ac with automatic channel selection, but only on non-DFS channels (36, 40, 44, 48, 149, 153, 157, 161, 165) - skipping the UNII-2 bands that require radar detection. Max 10 clients. This looks like its probably meant for pit use?

Hardware Daemons

These four services bridge physical hardware to NT4:

The IODaemon is fairly interesting - it’s a small libusb-based binary that sends LED updates, CAN status, GPIO state, IP address, and team number to the external pico for the display. It reads the robot enabled state from /sys/kernel/can_heartbeat/enabledro and runs at the highest real-time priority of any service. This is what drives the physical status LEDs on the SystemCore case.

The ExpansionHubDaemon speaks the RHSP (REV Hardware Server Protocol) over USB-serial and publishes NT4 topics under /rhsp/ for motor control, encoder reading, servo control, and PID. It’s the built-in REV Expansion Hub support.

System Management

The diagnostics process is the web configuration API. It handles:

• GET/POST /api/team - set team number (written to /sys/team)
• GET/POST /api/wifi - configure SSID, password, WPA (rewrites hostapd.conf, restarts the AP)
• GET/POST /api/network - configure eth0 networking (rewrites dhcpcd.conf)
• GET /api/health - health check
• GET /api/oshash - OS version hash (curious whether this will get used to validate the SystemCore image on the FMS?)

The update manager handles the A/B partition scheme. It receives a partition image, DD-extracts it to the inactive rootfs partition, then mounts the boot partition read-write and updates autoboot.txt. The reboot uses the Pi’s tryboot mechanism - sudo reboot "0 tryboot" - which boots into the new partition once, and only commits it as the default after validation. If it fails, you just power cycle and it falls back. Classic A/B update pattern, well executed.

The package manager uses opkg under the hood and reads X-Port, X-Launch-Command, and X-Auto-Start from IPK control files. This is what creates the /home/systemcore/robotCommand script that robot.service executes - it’s generated from the installed package metadata, not baked into the image.

RadioDaemon

Thad House (WPILib dev) confirmed that RadioDaemon, ExpansionHubDaemon, and PowerDistributionDaemon are all open source. The RadioDaemon is meant to talk to the HTTP server on the FRC field radio and relay link quality info back to the DS over NT4 - but it hasn’t actually been written yet, which explains why the binary has NT4 plumbing but zero radio-specific strings. It’s a stub. The actual WiFi AP is handled entirely by hostapd and dnsmasq directly.

Robot Code Runner

[Service]
Type=simple
User=systemcore
LimitRTPRIO=50
ExecStartPre=/bin/bash -c '\
  timeout=15; echo "waiting for can interfaces"; \
  while [[ $timeout > 0 ]]; do \
    good=true; \
    for can in can_s0 can_s1 can_s2 can_s3 can_s4; do \
      if ! ip link show $can up 2>/dev/null | grep -q "state UP"; then \
        good=false; fi; done; \
    if [[ $good = true ]]; then exit 0; fi; \
    sleep 1; timeout=$((timeout-1)); done'
ExecStart=/bin/bash /home/systemcore/robotCommand
Restart=always
RestartSec=3

The robot.service runs as the systemcore user (UID 105) with real-time priority 50. It waits up to 15 seconds for all five CAN interfaces to come up before starting user code. The robotCommand script itself isn’t in the image - it’s created at runtime by the package manager when user code is deployed. The ConditionPathExists=/home/systemcore/robotCommand directive means the service won’t even attempt to start until code has been deployed, which is a nice touch.

Smart IO

The SystemCore integrates an RP2350 microcontroller for Smart IO - the successor to the Raspberry Pi Pico’s PIO (Programmable IO). Unlike a standalone Pico, this RP2350 has no flash attached; instead, the CM5 loads its firmware into RAM over a serial interface at boot time. The corresponding Linux kernel modules handle this loading sequence, pushing the UF2-style firmware blob from the picoflasherprocess (which carries an embedded fw.uf2 at 127 KB) into the RP2350’s RAM before the IO daemon starts. The iodaemon then communicates with the RP2350 over USB (via libusb) to drive the status LEDs, relay CAN bus info, and handle GPIO.

Odds and Ends

The image ships with a VS Code server on port 4900 and a ttyd web terminal on port 4901. On the discovery side, the SystemCore advertises itself via mDNS as both _SystemCore._tcp and the legacy NI services (_ni._tcp, _ni-rt._tcp). It currently uses the roboRIO hostname pattern roboRIO-{team}-FRC alongside SystemCore-{team}-FIRST. This was done as a backwards compatibilty move during the beta period but will be removed in the full release in 2027.

One other oddity is the xone-* kernel modules - Xbox controller drivers for the wireless dongle, gamepad, chatpad, and headset. In normal FRC the flow is controllers -> DS -> robot, so having Xbox drivers on the robot side seems pointless. These are out-of-tree modules that someone deliberately added to the Buildroot config, but my guess is they’re leftover from Limelight’s general-purpose image config rather than something the SystemCore actually uses. Still, it raises the question of whether they’re planning some kind of direct-attach mode for FTC maybe?.

Finally, the hostname is just robot and /etc/os-release identifies as limelightos_systemcore_beta with a git-hash version string. The whole userspace is owned by UID 105 / GID 113 (systemcore).

I will update this post if I find more interesting things over the next few months and I have some interesting ideas in the pipeline for testing with this 👀

Errata

• 2026-04-25 16:50 - Added clarification from Thad House on radio daemon not being written yet
• 2026-04-25 16:55 - Added clarification that dual hostnames will be removed for production release
• 2026-04-25 21:25 - Fixed eMMC size (16 GB physical, ~14.5 GB formatted; 10 GB is image partitions only), added RP2350 Smart IO section, corrected SystemCore capitalization

Match Timeline

A match lasts 2 minutes and 40 seconds (160 seconds total):

Winning autonomous affects your Hub status so if your alliance scores the most Fuel in AUTO, your Hub is Inactive for Shifts 1 & 3, and Active for Shifts 2 & 4.

Ranking points

For Regional/District events:

• Energized RP: Score 100 Fuel (1 RP)
• Supercharged RP: Score 360 Fuel (1 RP)
• Traversal RP: Earn 50 Tower points (1 RP)

BPS calculator

Use this calculator to determine the balls per second (BPS) your robot needs to achieve ranking point thresholds. Adjust parameters based on your robot’s capabilities and strategy.

The max bps is only used in the simulation of the match while the results section is doing back propagation to figure out the necessary BPS needed to hit that ranking point no matter how high that is. If one of the results says “N/A” that means that your reload time is too high and eats up enough shooting time its no longer possible to hit that ranking point threshold.

Hopefully this can help your team! May your BPS be ever optimal.

I have a few main machines. In order of when I first got them they are:

1. broylt (~2021 main pc / gpu machine :windows:)
2. thespia (~2022 first homelab workstation; runs a vm named vault which houses my storage :proxmox:)
3. ember (~2024 first “real” server; dell poweredge r210 :ubuntu:)
4. nest (early 2024 shared tilde server @ Hackclub :nix:)
5. moonlark (late 2024 framework 13; was my main laptop but the mainboard fried itself and I haven’t fixed it yet :nix:)
6. tacyon / pihole (summer 2025 rpi 5 home manager cyber pi / pihole :raspberry_pi:)
7. atalanta (late 2025 macbook air m4 16gb main computing device and what I’m typing this on rn :mac:)
8. terebithia (late 2025 oracle cloud free tier arm vm with 24gb ram and 150 gb of storage :nix:)
9. prattle (late 2025 oracle cloud amd vm that has since died but it used to be my monitoring node :nix:)

As many of my machines as I can are running :nix: in some flavor. moonlark and terebithia are the only ones running nixos at the moment but I’m planning on switching ember over soon as well as maybe resurrecting prattle as well. All my other machines minus thespia and broylt are running my dots via home manager.

Ember

This used to run all of my services up till a month ago when I setup my oracle cloud instance and switched all of my main hosted services over. It currently runs my jellyfin / arr stack and any random workloads I want to throw somewhere without setting up a nix config for it. It in the very near future is probably going to become a quick deploy server in lieu of railway and similar services. The plan is to have a simple cli that will just throw everything on the server from a local repo and just run it with a domain.

For jellyfin the best way I have found to interact with it is via Ruddar on my phone and Infuse on either my phone or apple tv. It works insanely well for streaming stuff and I’m very tempted to buy a life time sub but I just don’t use my media library enough for it to be justified.

Terebithia

This has really been a rock solid machine for me. I have it setup with my nix config and it auto deploys with deploy-rs from github actions over tailscale. It is running my tangled.org knot so it hosts all of my git repos and I have a fancy little automation that sets up git hooks in the repos as they are created to auto mirror to github. It is also running cachet which is a slack profile picture and emoji proxy (thats where all the emojis in this blog are pulled from) that I built to work at extremely high scale. It was running on ember for a while but I swapped it over to here to be a bit more reliable since so many people in Hackclub rely on it now. I’m also running a few slack bots and battleship-arena again through their own nix services.

My most exciting services hosted on here though are bore and indiko. Bore is a little wrapper I made around frp which allows me to easily deploy and view my tunnels. It is essentially an ngrok replacement and super slick to use. I made a custom cli for it with gum and nix which you can find along with setup instructions on the tangled repo.

My newest project is Indiko. It is a selfhosted IndieAuth / OAuth 2.0 compatible auth server somewhat like Authelia or Authentik but mine! I can defined custom clients and then use it to authorize with my own apps. I’m planning to add support to bore for using indiko as an authentication middleware on protected tunnels probably tomorrow. I’m currently using this to authenticate my shortlinks service hop (repo) which allows me to add new viewers and admins on the fly!

There is still a ton of head room on this server so I’m looking forward to adding quite a bit more here.

The nix services stack

Right now I have a pretty sweet stack for how I deploy my apps with nix. I have a caddy setup that is connected to my cloudflare account for auto generating certifications via dns attestation and then because it’s nix I can just add a new caddy block and it adds it onto my config file.

The way it works is I have service modules in modules/nixos/services/ that follow a pretty consistent pattern. Each one has options for the domain, port, and secrets file. When you enable a service it creates a system user, sets up passwordless sudo for restarting the systemd service (needed for non interactive CI/CD), and then runs the app with whatever command is needed. The cool part is in the preStart where it git clones the repo if it doesn’t exist and then optionally pulls on restart so I can just push to github and restart the service to deploy. Most of the time though I set up a workflow with tailscale to ssh in and pull down the new content and then restart. I have finally started using proper acls and tags so I feel very proud of myself.

Each service automatically configures its own caddy virtualHost with cloudflare dns challenge for TLS. So when I add a new service I just do:

{
    atelier.services.cachet = {
        enable = true;
        domain = "cachet.dunkirk.sh";
        secretsFile = config.age.secrets.cachet.path;
    };
}

And boom - it clones the repo, installs dependencies, starts the systemd service, and sets up caddy with automatic HTTPS. All the secrets are managed with agenix so they’re encrypted with my ssh key and decrypted at boot. The cloudflare API token gets injected into caddy’s environment so the DNS challenge just works.

For more complex services like indiko I can add rate limiting in the caddy config – I have different rate limits for /auth/_, /api/_, and general routes all configured in the service module itself. It’s all declarative so the entire stack (caddy, TLS, DNS, users, app deployment) is just nix config that can be auto deployed via deploy-rs from github actions over tailscale.

Thespia

This is the most jank part of the whole lab. It is one of my oldest dedicated machines and it is kind of showing it’s age. I really don’t do much with it anymore but the harddrives are still somehow kicking. I inherited a large cardboard box of drives from my great uncle (I also got ember from him) and they all have about 10-15% of life left but are in 500 GB and 750 GB sizes which is a wee bit annoying. I’m most likely going to get a beelink or something else that is small and power efficent and just shove a ridiculous amount of m.2 SSDs in there.

This used to my my pride and joy and I paired it with an old laptop (laptops make shockingly good budget servers btw; they have essentially a built in ups after all and are quite power efficent at times) which was named thalia. Between those two I made a multi-node proxmox cluster and it was amazing.

Broylt

This is my first PC built from back when I was 13. I got some of the parts for my birthday and saved up to buy the rest and it was glorious when I first built it. Honestly it hasn’t changed a ton since back then. I swapped out the power supply as the original one kept failing and I had to RMA it. I also finally swapped the GPU to a 2070 Super a year or two ago which has been amazing. It is still rocking the original SSD, Asus B550M Plus Wifi motherboard, and the ryzen 5 3600 CPU and honestly I have very little complaints expect for the fact it is windows and that it keeps randomly crashing if I do anything too intense with the GPU. Honestly the issue is probably just that it needs a bigger PSU and as for windows thats really the only reason I still keep it around as you really still do need a windows box for running odd jobs and perhaps most importantly the occasional valorant session.

Atalanta

This is my macbook which I got this fall after my framework died. It definitly is a wee bit more reliable than my hacky hyprland config but I do still miss my framework. I will probably end up reviving it soon with a new mainboard and it will become my dual boot nixos / windows competition laptop for both FRC (robotics) and various cyber competitions.

As far as special stuff on this machine there isn’t a ton to tell. I’m doing some fancy configuration with nix darwin to make the default screenshot action copy to clipboard and I’m completely removing all pinned items from the doc but I really could be doing more (thanks to Nick Welsh for helping me realize this was possible last config confessions on LUP). I do have my custom shell config which I have been refining for the better part of a year and a half now. It was originally inspired by the Dreams of Code youtube channel zen shell config and then it has become heavily adapted over time. I really like how minimal and clean it feels. If I’m in a git repo it will adapt to display commit status and push / pull status and if I’m over ssh or in a zmx session it also adapts.

Zmx is another one of the fancy things I have started using. It is terminal sessions like tmux but without the bloat. It is a super small program but it does pretty much exactly what I want. I have my servers set up so that I can ssh into them with ssh t.* and it will use that session. It is super slick for long running processes.

Network stack

Everything is based on tplink stuff which I rather hate. Their access points are fine but the router and switch are despicable to work with. Their app is even worse if that is even possible. I really love my old setup of using an old workstation to run pfSense with two NICs. It was clean and reliable and the ui was okay to work with. I had to switch it over for my parents so that ostensibly it would be simpler and easier for them to use which as time has proven was very much not true. If money was no object I would love to get a founders edition Gateway router. You can really tell that it has had heart and soul poured into it and it looks soooooo good as a result.

As far as routing and port forwarding go I generally try to avoid it as much as humanly possible because of the atrocity of the router ui and as a result I have no ports open at the moment. I used cloudflare tunnels for practically everything at this point though now that I have my own VPS I might start using caddy to tunnel stuff back over tailscale for me instead.

Nest

This is where I used to host most of my throwaway services and slackbots. I still do host a fair amount here but it has got increasingly slower as the user count just keeps going up. It definetly isn’t the fault of the admins though. I’m friends with almost all of them and they have done a wonderful job trying to keep it online while it tries to explode itself constantly. It has quite litterally been upgraded at least 4 times now with more and more compute and storage and we keep running out.

Fully nixos server so there is that :)

Like most phishing emails I doubt most people would fall for this but if you were moving quickly and not thinking straight maybe you could fall for this?

Cloudflare has blocked the site due to phishing by now (13:17 Sept 24th) which is a shame since I would have loved to dig into the site a bit.

A lot of my infra workflows live in Slack threads, docs, or buried in shell history. That sucked. I've been building Atuin Desktop. Local-first, CRDT-powered, executable runbooks - with integrated terminals, sql queries + monitoring blog.atuin.sh/atuin-deskto... Lmk if you have any questions <3

@ellie.wtf

And it wasn’t that hard! Atuin is published on nixpkgs or can be installed via a flake and there is a home manager module for it too! Once you get past actual installation and into using agenix to declaritively manage your secrets then it gets annoying (proly mainly because i’m still pretty stupid when it comes to nix lol).

The first bit is that to access age secrets in home manager you have to actually export them in home manager (🤯) and you can’t just use the version from your configuration.nix. The second bit is that you also need to export the age file in your configuration.nix (that took me a solid half hour to figure out :uw_embarrassed:). The third and final thing however is that you can’t just save the secret and key files with agenix like normal but you have to strip the line endings from them 😭.

Here’s the basic scaffolding you’ll need for your Nix configuration:

configuration.nix

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

{
  # ... configuration options

  age.secrets = {
    atuin-session = {
        file = ../secrets/atuin-session.age;
        mode = "0444";
    };
    atuin-key = {
        file = ../secrets/atuin-key.age;
        mode = "0444";
    };
  };

  # ... more configuration options
}

and then the home-manager bit

shell.nix in home manager

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

{
  # ... some home-manager modules and configs

  programs.atuin = {
    enable = true;
    settings = {
      auto_sync = true;
      sync_frequency = "5m";
      sync_address = "https://api.atuin.sh";
      search_mode = "fuzzy";
      session_path = config.age.secrets."atuin-session".path;
      key_path = config.age.secrets."atuin-key".path;
    };
  };

  age.secrets = {
    atuin-session = {
      file = ../../secrets/atuin-session.age;
    };
    atuin-key = {
      file = ../../secrets/atuin-key.age;
    };
  };

  # ... even more home-manager configurations 😅
}

Now saving the secrets with agenix is not particularly tricky you just have to know that this is an option. Run agenix -e atuin-session.age and then paste in the session from ~/.local/share/atuin/session and then instead of just saving like normal you need to run :set binary and then :set noeol and then you can save the file like normal.

Anyways now i’m enjoying my stats and it’s on to the next project (proly serif.blue 👀)

> atuin stats
[▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮] 1209 gc
[▮▮▮▮      ]  495 curl
[▮▮        ]  348 bun
[▮▮        ]  329 cat
[▮         ]  222 z
[▮         ]  200 g
[▮         ]  162 nix-shell
[▮         ]  145 cd
[▮         ]  138 vi
[▮         ]  138 ls
Total commands:   7062
Unique commands:  7060

What finally pushed me over the edge was seeing the Duckquill theme and its fancy code blocks. I cloned the theme (git clone https://codeberg.org/daudix/duckquill.git) and figured out that the actual copy code was some reasonably simple js in static/copy-button.js. I copied that file and messed with it a bit as well as the css (sass/_pre-container.scss and some icon stuff in sass/_icon.scss) to make it work with my theme and style.

A quick hash for cache busting and import later it all worked!

templates/head.html

{% set jsHash = get_hash(path="js/copy-button.js", sha_type=256,
base64=true) %}
<script
  src="{{ get_url(path='js/copy-button.js?' ~ jsHash, trailing_slash=false) | safe }}"
  defer
></script>

The one thing I expanded on was the ability to specify a file name / comment for the code block. When js is disabled a markdown > blockquote on the line before the code block will create a header tab for the code block. I snipped the header tab idea from chevyray.dev and I grew to quite like it so I didn’t want to abandon it over a copy button.

Here is my code should you want to use it:

static/js/copy-button.js

// Based on https://www.roboleary.net/2022/01/13/copy-code-to-clipboard-blog.html
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", () => {
  const blocks = document.querySelectorAll("pre[class^='language-']");

  for (const block of blocks) {
    if (navigator.clipboard) {
      // Code block header title
      const title = document.createElement("span");
      const lang = block.getAttribute("data-lang");
      const comment =
        block.previousElementSibling &&
        (block.previousElementSibling.tagName === "blockquote" ||
          block.previousElementSibling.nodeName === "BLOCKQUOTE")
          ? block.previousElementSibling
          : null;
      if (comment) block.previousElementSibling.remove();
      title.innerHTML =
        lang + (comment ? ` (${comment.textContent.trim()})` : "");

      // Copy button icon
      const icon = document.createElement("i");
      icon.classList.add("icon");

      // Copy button
      const button = document.createElement("button");
      const copyCodeText = "Copy code"; // Use hardcoded text instead of getElementById
      button.setAttribute("title", copyCodeText);
      button.appendChild(icon);

      // Code block header
      const header = document.createElement("div");
      header.classList.add("header");
      header.appendChild(title);
      header.appendChild(button);

      // Container that holds header and the code block itself
      const container = document.createElement("div");
      container.classList.add("pre-container");
      container.appendChild(header);

      // Move code block into the container
      block.parentNode.insertBefore(container, block);
      container.appendChild(block);

      button.addEventListener("click", async () => {
        await copyCode(block, header, button); // Pass the button here
      });
    }
  }

  async function copyCode(block, header, button) {
    const code = block.querySelector("code");
    const text = code.innerText;

    await navigator.clipboard.writeText(text);

    header.classList.add("active");
    button.setAttribute("disabled", true);

    header.addEventListener(
      "animationend",
      () => {
        header.classList.remove("active");
        button.removeAttribute("disabled");
      },
      { once: true },
    );
  }
});

and the css:

sass/css/_copy-button.scss

i.icon {
    display: inline-block;
    mask-size: cover;
    background-color: currentColor;
    width: 1rem;
    height: 1rem;
    font-style: normal;
    font-variant: normal;
    line-height: 0;
    text-rendering: auto;
}

.pre-container {
    --icon-copy: url("data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg viewBox='0 0 16 16' height='16' width='16' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'%3E%3Cpath d='M0 3c0-1.645 1.355-3 3-3h5c1.645 0 3 1.355 3 3 0 .55-.45 1-1 1s-1-.45-1-1c0-.57-.43-1-1-1H3c-.57 0-1 .43-1 1v5c0 .57.43 1 1 1 .55 0 1 .45 1 1s-.45 1-1 1c-1.645 0-3-1.355-3-3zm5 5c0-1.645 1.355-3 3-3h5c1.645 0 3 1.355 3 3v5c0 1.645-1.355 3-3 3H8c-1.645 0-3-1.355-3-3zm2 0v5c0 .57.43 1 1 1h5c.57 0 1-.43 1-1V8c0-.57-.43-1-1-1H8c-.57 0-1 .43-1 1m0 0'/%3E%3C/svg%3E");
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    margin: 1rem 0 1rem;
    border-radius: 0.75rem;

    .header {
        display: flex;
        justify-content: space-between;
        align-items: center;
        border-radius: 0.2em 0.2em 0 0;
        background-color: var(--accent);
        background-size: 200%;
        padding: 0.25rem;
        height: 2.5rem;

        span {
            margin-inline-start: 0.75rem;
            color: var(--purple-gray);
            font-weight: bold;
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        button {
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            border-radius: 0.4rem;
            background-color: transparent;
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            color: var(--purple-gray);
            line-height: 0;

            &:hover {
                background-color: color-mix(
                    in oklab,
                    var(--accent) 80%,
                    var(--purple-gray)
                );
            }

            &:focus {
                background-color: color-mix(
                    in oklab,
                    var(--accent) 80%,
                    var(--purple-gray)
                );
            }

            &:active {
                transform: scale(0.9);
            }

            &:disabled {
                cursor: not-allowed;

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                mask-image: var(--icon-copy);
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                color: var(--purple-gray);

                .icon {
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                }
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            @keyframes active-copy {
                50% {
                    transform: scale(0.9);
                }
                100% {
                    transform: none;
                }
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        }
    }

    pre {
        margin: 0;
        box-shadow: none;
        border-radius: 0 0 0.2em 0.2em;
    }
}

2021

2022

2023

the tool (🥁 roll please)

this tool does support keyboard navigation btw ^-^
arrow keys to move and + and - to zoom

the math

I was able to make it a bit simpler by restricting the domain of this tool to spherical mirrors (the only type used in this Module of my physics textbook) but I did tackle both concave and convex mirrors. It generates 3 rays: a horizontal ray, a ray through the focal point, and a ray through the radius of curvature. The first and last are quite easy to generate but the third was a bit more difficult. I ended up using a formula that I don’t quite understand to get the point on the mirror where the ray intersects but it does work so 🤷.

The horizontal ray was dead simple. Draw a line from the top of the arrow to the edge of the mirror and then draw another line from focal point through the intersection point in the mirror. The part of that ray that is behind the mirror is simply the extension of the ray for virtual images but the part in front of the mirror is the actual path of the ray.

// Draw the horizontal ray
ctx.strokeStyle = "green";
ctx.beginPath();
ctx.lineTo(objX, objY - h);
let intersectionX =
    Math.sqrt((R * scale) ** 2 - h ** 2) + circleCenterX;
ctx.lineTo(intersectionX, objY - h);
extendRayToCanvasEdge(
    intersectionX,
    objY - h,
    centerX - F * scale,
    centerY,
);
ctx.stroke();

The ray through the radius of curvature was also fairly simple but alot more fun to figure out the math for. Since we know that there is a right angle triange between the arrow, center line, and the radius we can use the pythagorean theorem to find the missing side of the intersection height and then we can use the ratio of the radius to the arrow base to find the proper x offset.

// Draw the ray through the radius of curvature
ctx.strokeStyle = "orange";
ctx.beginPath();
ctx.lineTo(objX, objY - h);
ctx.lineTo(circleCenterX, centerY);
const extendedRay3 = findCircleIntersection(
    R * scale,
    objX,
    h,
    circleCenterX,
    centerY,
    circleCenterX,
    centerY,
);
ctx.lineTo(extendedRay3[0].x, extendedRay3[0].y);
extendRayToCanvasEdge(
    extendedRay3[0].x,
    extendedRay3[0].y,
    centerX - R * scale,
    centerY,
);
ctx.stroke();

The last ray, the one through the focal point, was the most difficult to figure out. I had to do quite a bit of geometry to find where this ray intersects the mirror. To find this intersection point I used a method that finds where a line intersects with a circle by solving a quadratic equation. This was necessary because the mirror is actually just part of a circle, and by finding where the ray intersects with that circle I can then determine if that intersection point is actually on the mirror’s surface.

// Draw the ray through the focal point
ctx.strokeStyle = "purple";
ctx.beginPath();
ctx.lineTo(objX, objY - h);
ctx.lineTo(centerX - F * scale, centerY);
const extendedRay2 = findCircleIntersection(
    R * scale,
    objX,
    h,
    centerX - F * scale,
    centerY,
    circleCenterX,
    centerY,
);
ctx.lineTo(extendedRay2[0].x, extendedRay2[0].y);
ctx.lineTo(0, extendedRay2[0].y);
ctx.stroke();

The method works by taking the equation of the line between our arrow tip and focal point (y = mx + b) and the equation of our mirror’s circle ((x-h)² + (y-k)² = r²) and substituting one into the other. This gives us a quadratic equation that we can solve to find the x coordinates of the intersection points. Once we have these x values, we can plug them back into our line equation to get the y coordinates.

Then we just need to check which of these intersection points is actually on the mirror’s surface (since a line can intersect a circle in up to two points) and use that for our ray. From there, we can draw the reflected ray just like with the other two methods.

I will freely admit that I made heavy use of gpt-4o to figure out the inital equations as thats a bit beyond the current scope of my knowledge. The rest of the ray logic was too complex for gemini or claude to figure out so that bit was all me 😎

// fancy complex scary math 👻
function findCircleIntersection(radius, x1, h, x3, y3, centerX, centerY) {
    // Check if the input values are valid
    if (radius <= 0) {
        throw new Error("Invalid input values.");
    }

    // Calculate the slope of the line from (x1, h) to (x3, y3)
    const m = (y3 - (centerY - h)) / (x3 - x1);

    // Define the line equation: y = h + m * (x - x1)
    // Substitute into circle equation: (x-centerX)^2 + (y-centerY)^2 = radius^2
    // y = h + m * (x - x1)
    // (x-centerX)^2 + (h + m*(x-x1) - centerY)^2 = radius^2

    // Coefficients for the quadratic equation
    const a = 1 + m * m;
    const b = -2 * centerX + 2 * m * (centerY - h - centerY - m * x1);
    const c =
        centerX * centerX +
        (centerY - h - centerY - m * x1) *
            (centerY - h - centerY - m * x1) -
        radius * radius;

    // Calculate the discriminant
    const discriminant = b * b - 4 * a * c;

    if (discriminant < 0) {
        throw new Error("No intersection found.");
    }

    // Calculate the two possible x values
    const xIntersect1 = (-b + Math.sqrt(discriminant)) / (2 * a);
    const xIntersect2 = (-b - Math.sqrt(discriminant)) / (2 * a);

    // Calculate the corresponding y values
    const yIntersect1 = centerY - h + m * (xIntersect1 - x1);
    const yIntersect2 = centerY - h + m * (xIntersect2 - x1);

    // Return the intersection points
    return [
        { x: xIntersect1, y: yIntersect1 },
        { x: xIntersect2, y: yIntersect2 },
    ];
}

I started with the naive method of just having a .git/hooks/pre-commit file that would run exiftool on the input but after realizing that hooks placed there wouldn’t be synced to the repo decided that wasn’t the best way. I moved to using a script that would symlink files from the hooks directory to .git/hooks. It worked moderately well but due to the fact that I used (yes I feel the shame admitting this :uw_embarrassed:) #!/bin/bash instead of #!/usr/bin/env bash. Not realizing my mistake and believing it to be related to the symlink I found this stack overflow answer which taught me that you can use git config core.hooksPath hooks to move the hooks directory to ./hooks in the root of your repo! After doing that and it still not working (i feel very dense writing this lol) I finally realized that the shebang was wrong and then it worked!

Is there anything at all to learn from this? Well yes actually! You can use the script below and the git config core.hooksPath hooks setting to scrub your own images!

hooks/pre-commit

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Check if exiftool is installed
if ! command -v exiftool &> /dev/null; then
  echo "Error: exiftool is not installed.  Please install it." >&2
  exit 1
fi

while read -r file; do
  case "$file" in
    *.jpg|*.jpeg|*.png|*.gif|*.tiff|*.bmp)
      echo "Removing EXIF data from: $file" >&2
      exiftool -all= --icc_profile:all -tagsfromfile @ -orientation -overwrite_original "$file"
      if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
        echo "Error: exiftool failed to process $file" >&2
        exit 1
      fi
      git add "$file"
      ;;
    *)
      ;;
  esac
done < <(git diff --cached --name-only --diff-filter=ACMR)

exit -0

if you want to add something or comment on the post then I posted about it on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dunkirk.sh/post/3liaybkkas226

Actually fixing it

First I had to find the affected disk physically in my case. Because I was stupid I didn’t bother to label them but thankfully the serial numbers of the drives are stuck to them with a sticker so that wasn’t terrible.

Now we can run lsblk -o +MODEL,SERIAL to find the serial number of our new drive.

root@thespia:~# lsblk -o +MODEL,SERIAL

NAME                      MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS MODEL                   SERIAL
sda                         8:0    0 698.6G  0 disk             ST3750640NS             3QD0BG0J
├─sda1                      8:1    0 698.6G  0 part
└─sda9                      8:9    0     8M  0 part
sdb                         8:16   0 698.6G  0 disk             ST3750640NS             3QD0BN6V
sdc                         8:32   0 698.6G  0 disk             ST3750640NS             3QD0BQ5G
├─sdc1                      8:33   0 698.6G  0 part
└─sdc9                      8:41   0     8M  0 part
sdd                         8:48   1 111.8G  0 disk             Hitachi HTS543212L9SA02 090130FBEB00LGGJ35RF
├─sdd1                      8:49   1  1007K  0 part
├─sdd2                      8:50   1   512M  0 part /boot/efi
└─sdd3                      8:51   1 111.3G  0 part
  ├─pve-swap              253:0    0     8G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
  ├─pve-root              253:1    0  37.8G  0 lvm  /
  ├─pve-data_tmeta        253:2    0     1G  0 lvm
  │ └─pve-data-tpool      253:4    0  49.6G  0 lvm
  │   ├─pve-data          253:5    0  49.6G  1 lvm
  │   ├─pve-vm--100--cloudinit
  │   │                   253:6    0     4M  0 lvm
  │   ├─pve-vm--101--cloudinit
  │   │                   253:7    0     4M  0 lvm
  │   ├─pve-vm--103--disk--0
  │   │                   253:8    0     4M  0 lvm
  │   └─pve-vm--103--disk--1
  │                       253:9    0    32G  0 lvm
  └─pve-data_tdata        253:3    0  49.6G  0 lvm
    └─pve-data-tpool      253:4    0  49.6G  0 lvm
      ├─pve-data          253:5    0  49.6G  1 lvm
      ├─pve-vm--100--cloudinit
      │                   253:6    0     4M  0 lvm
      ├─pve-vm--101--cloudinit
      │                   253:7    0     4M  0 lvm
      ├─pve-vm--103--disk--0
      │                   253:8    0     4M  0 lvm
      └─pve-vm--103--disk--1
                          253:9    0    32G  0 lvm
sde                         8:64   0 465.8G  0 disk             WDC WD5000AAKS-65YGA0   WD-WCAS83511331
├─sde1                      8:65   0 465.8G  0 part
└─sde9                      8:73   0     8M  0 part
sdf                         8:80   1     0B  0 disk             Multi-Card              20120926571200000
zd0                       230:0    0    32G  0 disk
├─zd0p1                   230:1    0   100M  0 part
├─zd0p2                   230:2    0    16M  0 part
├─zd0p3                   230:3    0  31.4G  0 part
└─zd0p4                   230:4    0   522M  0 part
zd16                      230:16   0    80G  0 disk
├─zd16p1                  230:17   0     1M  0 part
└─zd16p2                  230:18   0    80G  0 part
zd32                      230:32   0     4M  0 disk
zd48                      230:48   0    80G  0 disk
├─zd48p1                  230:49   0     1M  0 part
└─zd48p2                  230:50   0    80G  0 part
zd64                      230:64   0    32G  0 disk
├─zd64p1                  230:65   0   512K  0 part
└─zd64p2                  230:66   0    32G  0 part
zd80                      230:80   0     1M  0 disk

Our two current drives are 3QD0BG0J and 3QD0BQ5G as we can see in proxmox but we can also see that they have partitions and sdb/3QD0BN6V does not so thats our target drive. Now we can find the disk by id with ls /dev/disk/by-id | grep 3QD0BN6V which gives us:

ls /dev/disk/by-id | grep 3QD0BN6V

ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0BN6V

We are going to go with the first id so no we move on to the zfs part. Running zpool status vault-of-the-eldunari we can get the status of the pool:

zpool status vault-of-the-eldunari

  pool: vault-of-the-eldunari
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices could not be used because the label is missing or
        invalid.  Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue
        functioning in a degraded state.
action: Replace the device using 'zpool replace'.
   see: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/msg/ZFS-8000-4J
  scan: resilvered 8.33G in 00:48:26 with 0 errors on Thu Nov 14 18:38:03 2024
config:

        NAME                          STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        vault-of-the-eldunari         DEGRADED     0     0     0
          raidz1-0                    DEGRADED     0     0     0
            9201394420428878514       UNAVAIL      0     0     0  was /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0BM29-part1
            ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0BQ5G  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0BG0J  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

We can add our new disk with zpool replace vault-of-the-eldunari 9201394420428878514 ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0BN6V but first we wipe the disk from proxmox under the disks tab on our proxmox node to make sure its all clean before we restore the pool after we do that we also initalize a new gpt table. Now we are ready to replace the disk. Running this command can take quite a while and it doesn’t output anything so sit tight. After waiting a few minutes proxmox reported that resilvering would take 1:49 minutes and it was 5% done already! I hope this helped at least one other person but I’m mainly writing this to remind myself how to do this when it inevitably happens again :)

The yap

Hi! My name is Kieran, and I’ve been interested in / involved with cybersecurity and programming since I first started using a laptop at 10! I started out with a raspberry pi 3b+ which taught me how to use debian as well as the basics of creating and maintaining databases and web services. I moved on to an ubuntu laptop about a year latter and started using my raspberry pi as a home server to run small websites on our local lan. Soon I wanted to share them with others and expose them to the internet, so I learned how to use dns and port forwarding and then how to secure the server to prevent attacks with tools like fail2ban!

Over the next 2 years, I systematically read every single book in the tech section of my local library and became interested in white-hat hacking. I taught myself how to use kali linux and metasploit with the help of many web searches and had quite a bit of fun rooting and then sideloading custom payloads onto our families set of kindle fires (I was eventually restricted to just playing with just one but I did make a home security system with all of them once). I figured out wireshark and started playing with wifi protocals but eventually reached the limit of what I could figure out on my own and took a quick detour of two years to learn blender and build my first computer.

I became interested in home labs and self hosting services around 14 and bought an old workstation off ebay which combined with my set of 3 rasberry pis and several old laptops (and one old pentium tower that I found on the side of the road) made quite a nice playground for deploying my own services. Half a year later I had to pick it all up and move up north which was quite the adventure; my services got completely messed up during the move, and it took my a week or so tinkering with everything to get it back to a stable state.

After the move, I became quite interested in front end development and started making quite a few websites and various random coding projects. If you look on my GitHub contributions graph (github.com/taciturnaxolotl, you can see it go from a lightly speckled grid in 2021 and 2022 to a much more solid commit streak in 2023. I only had one week when I didn’t code anything and that was the second week of the year :) Toward the end of that year I started learning about hardware design and made my first PCB! I also joined a wonderful community called hackclub where I met a ton of amazing teenagers who were also interested in tech just like me! I joined an FRC robotics team in January of the next year and had a blast designing, building, and programming a custom meter square, 150 lb, industrial robot to compete in that year’s game!

During that same time I also started a 501(c)3 named Purple Bubble with friends that I had met through Hackclub focused on making a secure, cost-effective, and privacy preserving messaging protocol. We drafted a specification and poured many, many hours into planning and developing the protocol over the next year but eventual realized that the messaging protocol space is incredibly hard and that there were innate flaws in our protocol that would compromise the security of the app (We couldn’t find a good way to anonymize connections to a network of server’s while also providing zero metadata transfer of messages between servers; we had originally planned for the protocol to be zero trust federated, but this proved to be a challenge that, no matter how hard we kept thinking and talking about it, we couldn’t find a solution too). I learned a huge amount about organizing a group of people and running an organization through that experience and made some wonderful friends, so it wasn’t entirely in vain.

My latest project and biggest learning experience in both security and development has been building a time tracking server for coding called Hackatime. It is fully compatible with the popular wakatime.org, which allows it to leverage the hundreds of existing extensions for tracking time spent coding in almost every popular IDE and editor. I made this as a part of an event Hackclub ran called High Seas where they encouraged high school students to make cool projects by giving out awesome prizes for time spent coding (you had to “ship” your project where it would get voted on by the other four thousand teens participating and then via a custom ELO system convert your hours into “doubloons” that could be redeemed for prizes like framework laptops, soldering irons, McMaster Car credits, and many others. If you want to learn more about it, the website is highseas.hackclub.com). In order to track the time of the thousands of teenagers participating, I created this server which was handling thousands of users an hour and hundreds of requests a second. I learned how to scale the server and database and learned an incredible amount that only comes at scale. At one point I got an email that the database bill had increased so much over the previous month that we were going to hit both the $1k hard limit and then a $4k limit that I had placed on the monthly bill, expecting never to hit it. The team hosting the database (Cockroach DB) graciously offered to reduce our bill down to only $500 which was incredible. There were many more instances where things broke, or where I discovered security issues that made me grow an insane amount in my knowledge of how to fix things and really pushed me out of my comfort zone. (If you want to take a look at the github repo it is at github.com/hackclub/hackatime and the hosted version is at waka.hackclub.com with a live hours counted tracker)

I’m still trying to figure out what exactly I want to major in, and I’m pretty solidly split between Comp Sci with a cybersecurity focus and Computer/Electrical Engineering. I’m hoping that this camp can help make that decision a bit more clear and give me a better understanding of what getting a major in Cyber Security would be like!

Connecting to Mitmproxy

I’m connecting over WireGuard, so I fired up mitmproxy with mitmweb --mode wireguard on my laptop. Connecting via WireGuard theoretically is pretty simple; all I need to do is to scan a qr code and connect. Unfortunately, the hotel Wi-Fi seems to be oddly segmented, and I can’t access the WireGuard server or ping my laptop from my phone. I’m going to try firing up a hot spot on my dad’s phone and see if that allows me to talk to my phone.

I messed with getting my laptop to connect to my dad’s phone, but it kept refusing for some reason. My next idea is to ngrok the WireGuard tunnel, which ended up failing because ngrok doesn’t support UDP. Finally, after an embarrassingly long time, I realized that I could simply use ngrok tcp 8080 and the HTTP proxy server built into mitmproxy instead. After installing the root certificate and trusting it in the iPhone settings, we were good to go!

Digging around in the Hilton Honors app

First I had to download the app, which required disabling the proxy as iOS seems to ignore certificate trust settings for the app store. Enrollment happened via the https://m.hilton.io/graphql/customer?operationName=createGuest&type=enroll endpoint and was as follows:

POST

{
  "query": "...",
  "variables": {
    "input": {
      "email": {
        "emailAddress": "xxxx-xxxx-xxxx@duck.com"
      },
      "preferredLanguage": "EN",
      "enrollSourceCode": "IOSEW",
      "phone": {
        "phoneNumber": "xxxxxxxxxx",
        "phoneType": "home"
      },
      "subscriptions": {
        "hhonorsSubscriptions": [],
        "optOuts": {
          "survey": false,
          "marketing": false
        }
      },
      "name": {
        "firstName": "Kieran",
        "lastName": "Klukas"
      },
      "address": {
        "city": "Washington",
        "addressType": "home",
        "addressLine2": null,
        "postalCode": "20003",
        "state": "DC",
        "addressLine1": "1600 Pennsylvania Ave SE Apartments",
        "country": "US"
      },
      "privacyRequested": false,
      "password": "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
    },
    "language": "en_US"
  },
  "operationName": "createGuest"
}

---
mutation createGuest($input: EnrollInput!, $language: String!) {
    createGuest(language: $language, input: $input) {
        data {
            guestId
            hhonorsNumber
        }
        error {
            code
            context
            message
            notifications {
                code
                fields
                message
            }
        }
    }
}

response

{
    "data": {
        "createGuest": {
            "data": {
                "guestId": 1726240000,
                "hhonorsNumber": "225782xxxx"
            },
            "error": null
        }
    },
    "extensions": {
        "logSearch": "mdc.client_message_id=51da35305bde9b71e7faa2993ebc2a619e50c598-iap71t195vk6jur6eyd83hy9g21w4bzam"
    }
}

headers

{
    "access_token": "DX.eyJhbGciOiJSU0EtT0FFUCIsImVuYyI6IkEyNTZHQ00iLCJwaWQiOiJtb2JpbGUiLCJraWQiOiJWTktOaU9WLTZ4c2cyOXQ2dEJUMmR5Nnl1TEJPUG8tb2FycDFpZzZnVWdZIn0.Yfxkp8Jnrwttmrp_QcMTp6HwW2yBzEIROsAjheNVd3LgIWBQVfw5UDstAd7qA3MKZffoKSf7SbkopJhWIr-vreOYQ2BZEf2a9DYm4p-tD9jXEMsuVY9offYqjRzyeWwcjLyWq9ubnUBpQuCHMNUO1025BZkNV3NYG3_LZfJlNc77aMawrfS52zi5I5hSL0zAs3K7kxYuReJEC-RzASt-coPHEmdkmDp1TLqujqe8Opy6z4DC8xFDFkO09J-tN6RwolJ6jtssr0vnFyCv9zw_lbAQppB0jbWZqxiEmNk_krC4laOsChe3bUJc8ECeKltvqgVnSAKAhz-zBfy9EbFeew.Wki3N1rclvnjMfA4.dtWVnkpMJZixW86Q9hiiBY30_Oa1NHPLM_SuuAjtTrY-QZilp5tgu7COJtiVYI51_j6nIOHdX2oI0EoiHaPhzC4YizFxNbZsUfpR0W6wPVWj3LpdTr23GMhoOga5UTFCbaehb5XCsWr9PLfnLc2tSGyi4wZOSGrSidQUCDQ6UssUTxt6vvlp5y623EbvkMEi-ok6IXqUnYgsztcz_i14GKRHdRmJZFACJj3X0zQLarN4b19KEwvqIXfIrpPWpr1f74ozamM6CUEQhqoF61cucKCxKf0hU7kAyMduo4l3OfEkghQUfrlfA1D7eoInyPcOb8a3_LjQhGXwh1XVoElXUriuP7yEOfyksv59_pKCWajzJuyWdEl164OZXAFmMkdQ89flDO3_nRZUliMXapnWkU3WDBGD_gQ49sYbxlAh95l0HiJeKZwf2g4DTlEb6ccauRAbUzD2Fopoe2ldMXL-wBkVg2Grx8SfaCnOCiyfGq2HloJMf-8YRz-tWQoTXFEM30KdJCWY70sUTY9LeWVQrz4dnpZlRk29KyNi20YsdQRK3y9_ZFL0qs4IJwhddtrhzQVKz6oaxDPgQxy2vK1DErers-8-oJ3WgDho9l9D7Z7U9C1spjf1IIBG5hvdtCiExqh78fFsizcvkG9oeHB09Z1oGU3jL_cUFKrrUp9ZXnOKlwU1BjFPrOjVVZi97-rVN3IjvlRjJCBfFCf2CxlbZcib_CWSiD0vtFsloClkmSho2ynnbLQG341SibvaO4TKygttS-NsluDjBtpuJydlNjDAXO6ZvWRiFWcHDrDqiBeo897yUM40kHYFXBpjhbiIDcCnAJu6GDozbacnGsEGOJlauASm3t8TFn1lPd_kQgd3Uy2fDtTCKxxSaXA4RvHwUbBgYWU4SMA7UPYn_RygkxUZ0UL4ZHfN1-bDpkQ16DLm0Q.hh53MImM9BA7Ujib61RUOg",
    "exp": 1728879203,
    "expires_in": 3600,
    "iat": 1728875603,
    "scope": "am_application_scope default",
    "token_type": "Bearer"
}

At this point I went to bed as it was about 23:30, but I set my alarm for 5:30 (if you know me I never get up before 8:00, so this is rare) and actually managed to wake-up on time. It’s always quite curious how excitement and a new place can cause you to wake-up earlier. Unfortunately, while I was sleeping my laptop died which caused me to lose the rest of the signup data. I’m going to invite myself to get the room key and see what API requests that triggers, and then try actually unlocking the door.

Invitation

Hi Kieran,
I’m sharing my Digital Key so you can use your phone as a room key.
If you already have the Hilton Honors app make sure you are on the latest version and click this https://hiltonhonors3.hilton.com/rs/hilton-honors-mobile-app?shareId=b4d6140d311e4c4c935dd653ca00af65 to accept the Digital Key.
If you don’t have the Hilton Honors app, download it using the link above and return to this message to accept within 8 hours to get your key.
See you soon,
xxxx xxxx

I shared the key which asked for a name and then opened the iOS share sheet and I choose to send by text (it sent the above message). I went back to my phone, clicked the link and low and behold we got a hit! https://hms.hiltonapi.com/hms/v1/digitalkey/invitation/accept:

POST

{
    "shareId": "b4d6140d311e4c4c935dd653ca00af65"
}

response

{
    "arrivalDateTime": "2024-10-13T15:00-04:00",
    "confirmationNumber": "5448xxxx",
    "ctyhocn": "GCYPAHX",
    "departureDateTime": "2024-10-14T11:00-04:00",
    "hotelName": "Hampton Inn & Suites Grove City",
    "stayId": "296088xxxx"
}

Another interesting request was to https://m.hilton.io/graphql/customer?operationName=hotel_brand&type=hotelDetails_GCYPAHX

POST

{
  "variables": {
    "ctyhocn": "GCYPAHX",
    "language": "en-US"
  },
  "operationName": "hotel_brand",
  "query": "..."
}

---
query hotel_brand($language: String!, $ctyhocn: String!) {
  hotel(language: $language, ctyhocn: $ctyhocn) {
    address {
      addressFmt
      addressLine1
      addressLine2
      city
      country
      countryName
      postalCode
      state
    }
    alerts {
      description
      type
    }
    amenities {
      id
      name
    }
    attributes {
      numberOfRestaurants
    }
    brand {
      isPartnerBrand
    }
    brandCode
    campus {
      type
    }
    chainCode
    checkin {
      checkinTimeFmt
      checkinTime
      checkoutTimeFmt
      checkoutTime
      digitalKey
    }
    config {
      checkout {
        allowDCO
      }
      connectedRoom {
        crEnabled
        crFullyEnabled
        emsEnabled
      }
      messaging {
        kipsuEnabled
        messagingTileEnabled
        gatewayRoutingEnabled
      }
      adjoiningRooms {
        active
      }
    }
    coordinate {
      latitude
      longitude
    }
    crsData {
      adultAge
      ageBasedPricing
      acceptedCreditCards
    }
    ctyhocn
    currencyCode
    display {
      treatments
    }
    gmtHours
    internetAddress
    name
    phoneNumber
    policyOptions {
      label
      value
      options {
        label
        value
      }
    }
    facilityOverview {
      shortDesc
    }
    images {
      master {
        altText
        url(height: 430, width: 612)
      }
      gallery {
        image(variant: searchPropertyImageThumbnail) {
          altText
          url(height: 430, width: 612)
        }
        masterImage
      }
      carousel {
        altText
        url(height: 430, width: 612)
      }
    }
  }
}

response

{
    "data": {
        "hotel": {
            "address": {
                "addressFmt": "4 Holiday Blvd., Mercer, Pennsylvania, 16137, USA",
                "addressLine1": "4 Holiday Blvd.",
                "addressLine2": null,
                "city": "Mercer",
                "country": "US",
                "countryName": "USA",
                "postalCode": "16137",
                "state": "PA"
            },
            "alerts": [
                {
                    "description": "The hotel will be undergoing exterior renovations September 03, 2024 - December 31, 2024. The interior and guestrooms will be unaffected. Thank you for your patience and understanding.",
                    "type": "alert"
                }
            ],
            "amenities": [
                {
                    "id": "adjoiningRooms",
                    "name": "Connecting Rooms"
                },
                {
                    "id": "freeBreakfast",
                    "name": "Free hot breakfast"
                },
                {
                    "id": "freeParking",
                    "name": "Free parking"
                },
                {
                    "id": "freeWifi",
                    "name": "Free WiFi"
                },
                {
                    "id": "nonSmoking",
                    "name": "Non-smoking rooms"
                },
                {
                    "id": "digitalKey",
                    "name": "Digital Key"
                },
                {
                    "id": "evCharging",
                    "name": "EV charging"
                },
                {
                    "id": "indoorPool",
                    "name": "Indoor pool"
                },
                {
                    "id": "fitnessCenter",
                    "name": "Fitness center"
                },
                {
                    "id": "petsAllowed",
                    "name": "Pet-friendly rooms"
                },
                {
                    "id": "meetingRooms",
                    "name": "Meeting rooms"
                }
            ],
            "attributes": {
                "numberOfRestaurants": 0
            },
            "brand": {
                "isPartnerBrand": false
            },
            "brandCode": "HP",
            "campus": {
                "type": "enhanced"
            },
            "chainCode": "HH",
            "checkin": {
                "checkinTime": "15:00",
                "checkinTimeFmt": "3:00 PM",
                "checkoutTime": "11:00",
                "checkoutTimeFmt": "11:00 AM",
                "digitalKey": true
            },
            "config": {
                "adjoiningRooms": {
                    "active": true
                },
                "checkout": {
                    "allowDCO": true
                },
                "connectedRoom": null,
                "messaging": {
                    "gatewayRoutingEnabled": true,
                    "kipsuEnabled": true,
                    "messagingTileEnabled": true
                }
            },
            "coordinate": {
                "latitude": 41.142354,
                "longitude": -80.164956
            },
            "crsData": {
                "acceptedCreditCards": [
                    "CU",
                    "VI",
                    "MC",
                    "AX",
                    "DS",
                    "DC",
                    "CB"
                ],
                "adultAge": null,
                "ageBasedPricing": null
            },
            "ctyhocn": "GCYPAHX",
            "currencyCode": "USD",
            "display": {
                "treatments": []
            },
            "facilityOverview": {
                "shortDesc": "We're off I-79, 10 minutes from Grove City. Grove City Premium Outlets and Wendell August Forge, America's oldest and largest working forge, are less than a mile away. Both Grove City College and Slippery Rock University are within 20 minutes of us. Enjoy free hot breakfast, free WiFi, and our indoor pool and hot tub."
            },
            "gmtHours": -4,
            "images": {
                "carousel": [
                    {
                        "altText": "Outdoor Patio",
                        "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2888809/gcypahx-patio.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                    },
                    {
                        "altText": "Double Queen",
                        "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/4248848/hampton-grove-city-standard-queen-1-preview.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                    },
                    {
                        "altText": "King Standard",
                        "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/4248016/hampton-grove-city-king-standard-1.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                    },
                    {
                        "altText": "Lobby and Dining Area",
                        "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2887422/lobby-1.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                    },
                    {
                        "altText": "Lobby",
                        "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2887224/lobby-2.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                    },
                    {
                        "altText": "Breakfast Buffet",
                        "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2880542/breakfast-1.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                    },
                    {
                        "altText": "Indoor Pool",
                        "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/4258295/hampton-new-pics-2008-035.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                    },
                    {
                        "altText": "Fitness Center",
                        "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2883297/fitness.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                    },
                    {
                        "altText": "Boardroom",
                        "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2879933/board-room.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                    },
                    {
                        "altText": "Meeting Room",
                        "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2888194/meeting.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                    },
                    {
                        "altText": "Hotel Exterior at Night",
                        "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/4251655/exterior-night.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                    },
                    {
                        "altText": "Business Center",
                        "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2881016/business-center.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                    }
                ],
                "gallery": [
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Outdoor Patio",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2888809/gcypahx-patio.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": true
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Double Queen",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/4248848/hampton-grove-city-standard-queen-1-preview.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "King Standard",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/4248016/hampton-grove-city-king-standard-1.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Lobby and Dining Area",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2887422/lobby-1.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Lobby",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2887224/lobby-2.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Breakfast Buffet",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2880542/breakfast-1.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Indoor Pool",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/4258295/hampton-new-pics-2008-035.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Fitness Center",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2883297/fitness.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Boardroom",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2879933/board-room.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Meeting Room",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2888194/meeting.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Hotel Exterior at Night",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/4251655/exterior-night.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Business Center",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2881016/business-center.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Indoor Pool / Whirlpool",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2885342/pool.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Double Queen Studio",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/4250170/hampton-new-pics-2008-020.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Whirlpool Suite",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/4251204/whirlpool-king-suite-one-2-2-.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Breakfast Area",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2880342/breakfast-2.tif?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Suite Shop",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2890823/gift-shop.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Hotel Exterior",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/390670/gcypahx-hampton-exterior-night-1.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Hotel Exterior",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/4255766/hampton-new-pics-2008-012.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    },
                    {
                        "image": {
                            "altText": "Double Queen Suite",
                            "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/4251117/double-queen-standard-2-.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                        },
                        "masterImage": false
                    }
                ],
                "master": {
                    "altText": "Outdoor Patio",
                    "url": "https://www.hilton.com/im/en/GCYPAHX/2888809/gcypahx-patio.jpg?impolicy=resize&rh=430&rw=612"
                }
            },
            "internetAddress": "https://www.hilton.com/en/hotels/gcypahx-hampton-suites-grove-city/",
            "name": "Hampton Inn & Suites Grove City",
            "phoneNumber": "+1 724-748-5744",
            "policyOptions": [
                {
                    "label": "Cancellation",
                    "options": [
                        {
                            "label": "Description",
                            "value": "Cancellation policies may vary depending on the rate or dates of your reservation. Please refer to your reservation confirmation to verify your cancellation policy. If you need further assistance, call the hotel directly or contact <a href=https://help.hilton.com/s/>customer service</a>. Alternatively, you can <a href=https://www.hilton.com/en/book/reservation/find/>cancel your reservation online</a>."
                        }
                    ],
                    "value": null
                },
                {
                    "label": "Check-in/Check-out",
                    "options": [
                        {
                            "label": "Checkin Time",
                            "value": "3:00 PM"
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Checkout Time",
                            "value": "11:00 AM"
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Early Departure Fee",
                            "value": null
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Late Checkout Fee",
                            "value": null
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Minimum Age To Register",
                            "value": "21"
                        }
                    ],
                    "value": null
                },
                {
                    "label": "Wi-Fi",
                    "options": [
                        {
                            "label": "Description",
                            "value": "Standard In-Room and Lobby Wi-Fi - All guests get free standard Wi-Fi in-room and in the lobby."
                        }
                    ],
                    "value": null
                },
                {
                    "label": "Parking",
                    "options": [
                        {
                            "label": "Covered",
                            "value": "Not Available"
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "In Out Privileges",
                            "value": "Not Available"
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Other Parking Information",
                            "value": "Parking Lot"
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Secured",
                            "value": "Not Available"
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Self Parking",
                            "value": "$0.00 Complimentary"
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Valet Parking",
                            "value": "Not Available"
                        }
                    ],
                    "value": null
                },
                {
                    "label": "Payment",
                    "options": [
                        {
                            "label": "Hotel Currency",
                            "value": "US Dollar"
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Accepted Payment Options",
                            "value": "American Express, Carte Blanche, China Union Pay, Diner's Club, Discover, MasterCard, Visa"
                        }
                    ],
                    "value": null
                },
                {
                    "label": "Pets",
                    "options": [
                        {
                            "label": "Deposit",
                            "value": "$50.00 Non-Refundable"
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Kennel Message",
                            "value": null
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Maximum Size",
                            "value": null
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Maximum Weight",
                            "value": null
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Other Pet Services",
                            "value": "$50(1-4n),$75(5+n) 2petsMax,dog/cat only"
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Pets Allowed",
                            "value": "Yes"
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Service Animals Allowed",
                            "value": "Yes"
                        }
                    ],
                    "value": null
                },
                {
                    "label": "Smoking",
                    "options": [
                        {
                            "label": "Indicator",
                            "value": "Non-Smoking"
                        },
                        {
                            "label": "Description",
                            "value": null
                        }
                    ],
                    "value": null
                }
            ]
        }
    },
    "extensions": {
        "logSearch": "mdc.client_message_id=51da35305bde9b71e7faa2993ebc2a619e50c598-uauhdwbaydoqbvy3uvuzai20c4takt22"
    }
}

It appears that Hilton relies very heavily on GraphQL, which is interesting. I would be interested in playing with those APIs more. For now, though, onto unlocking stuff!

Locks

When using the unlock button, it made a request to this URL: https://smetric.hilton.com/b/ss/hiltonglobalprod/10/IOSN030200030900/s65425920 with a payload of a URL encoded form.

POST

ndh:              1
cid.:             
card_no.:         
as:               0
id:               2257829743
.card_no:         
hhid.:            
as:               1
id:               2257829743
.hhid:            
.cid:             
aamb:             j8Odv6LonN4r3an7LhD3WZrU1bUpAkFkkiY1ncBR96t2PTI
aamlh:            7
c.:               
a.:               
AppID:            HHonors 2024.10.1 (1)
CarrierName:      --
DeviceName:       iPhone14,4
OSVersion:        iOS 18.1
Resolution:       1125x2436
RunMode:          Application
TimeSinceLaunch:  24560
action:           digital key:key:unlock_btn
.a:               
hm.:              
app.:             
name:             HHonors iOS Mobile
.app:             
digitalkeyflag:   Yes
event.:           
element.:         
click:            digital key:key:unlock_btn
.element:         
key.:             
unlock.:          
initiate:         1
.unlock:          
.key:             
.event:           
flag.:            
appsettings:      N|N|NA|N|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|NA|UsingApp|N|
orientation:      L
stay.:            
level.:           
status:           In-Stay
.level:           
.stay:            
timeCaptureAEP:   2024-10-14T09:59:44.676Z
timeCaptureEpoch: 1728899984
timeCaptureISO:   2024-10-14T05:59:44-0400
.flag:            
hotel.:           
brand:            HP
propertycode:     GCYPAHX
.hotel:           
key.:             
gnr:              79125065
locktype:         guest
lsn:              92044507
shared.:          
flag:             Yes
.shared:          
.key:             
page.:            
name:             
previous:         App:EN:Honors:Digital Key:Key
.page:            
purchase.:        
booking.:         
dates:            10132024:10142024:1
.booking:         
bookingid:        54486330
.purchase:        
site.:            
type:             PA
.site:            
user.:            
aam.:             
segments:         15218869,26458327,19493122,21537957,22516131,17952857,23583601,17952894,19484989,21539153,22889861,21539313,26458383,21881915,15217574
.aam:             
language:         en
login.:           
status:           Logged-in
.login:           
memberId:         2257829743
stayid:           2960880196
tierpoints:       Member
.user:            
.hm:              
.c:               
ce:               UTF-8
cp:               foreground
d.ptfm:           ios
mid:              61621496110939688115558742623055817571
pageName:         HHonors 2024.10.1 (1)
pe:               lnk_o
pev2:             AMACTION:digital key:key:unlock_btn
products:         ;GCYPAHX;;;;
t:                00/00/0000 00:00:00 0 240
ts:               1728899984

response

 {
  "stuff":[ {
    "cn":"TMS","cv":"web=17836315,Web-app=15217574,Web-app=17952857,Web-app=17952894,web-app=19493122,web-app=19484989,web-app=21539153,web-app=21539313,web-app=21881915,web-app=22516131,web-app=22889861,web-app=23583601,web-app=15218869,web-app=26458327,web-app=26458383,web-app=21537957","ttl":30,"dmn":""
  }
  , {
    "cn":"fltk","cv":"segID=15218869","ttl":30,"dmn":""
  }
  ],"uuid":"61645808922583835885560882535048239660","dcs_region":7,"tid":"RufgJCfxTjg="
}

About a second afterward, I get a second request to https://smetric.hilton.com/b/ss/hiltonglobalprod/10/IOSN030200030900/s88785229 with similar form data. Diff shown below.

POST.diff

23c23
< action:           digital key:key:unlock_btn
---
> action:           digital key:key:unlock:unlock_success
31,33d30
< element.:
< click:            digital key:key:unlock_btn
< .element:
36c33
< initiate:         1
---
> success:          1
48,50c45,47
< timeCaptureAEP:   2024-10-14T09:59:44.676Z
< timeCaptureEpoch: 1728899984
< timeCaptureISO:   2024-10-14T05:59:44-0400
---
> timeCaptureAEP:   2024-10-14T09:59:45.537Z
> timeCaptureEpoch: 1728899985
> timeCaptureISO:   2024-10-14T05:59:45-0400
79c76
< segments:         15218869,26458327,19493122,21537957,22516131,17952857,23583601,17952894,19484989,21539153,22889861,21539313,26458383,21881915,15217574
---
> segments:         21537957,22889861,23583601,15218869,17952857,21881915,21539313,22516131,19484989,26458383,19493122,17952894,15217574,21539153,26458327
97c94
< pev2:             AMACTION:digital key:key:unlock_btn
---
> pev2:             AMACTION:digital key:key:unlock:unlock_success
100c97,99
< ts:               1728899984
---
> ts:               1728899985
>
> *:8080mitmproxy 10.4.2 

response.diff

<   ],"uuid":"61645808922583835885560882535048239660","dcs_region":7,"tid":"RufgJCfxTjg="
---
>   ],"uuid":"61645808922583835885560882535048239660","dcs_region":7,"tid":"69dMPcWjQD4="

Replaying either of the requests does nothing except give a new tid value but doesn’t unlock the door. The sxxxxxxx part of the request URL also changes on every new request and doesn’t seem to match any discernible pattern. The IOSN030200030900 part never changes, however. My guess is that that part is a hotel reference ID. From doing some ducking around online, I couldn’t find any references to the smetric.hilton.com domain, but it was blocked by uBlock Origin as part of the EasyPrivacy block list. The app also seems to issue requests to this URL.

Wrap up

I tried running a Bluetooth scan to see if I could find the locks, but nothing popped out as being a likely culprit. I did however find an interesting set of 3 Bluetooth devices named “clearsky smart fleet” which upon research seems to be scissor lifts / construction equipment made by a company called JLG which is quite interesting. That would make sense, however, as I saw several scissor lifts outside the hotel on my way in.

By the time I’m writing this it’s 6:41, and I need to eat breakfast, so I’ll probably finish this post in the car this afternoon. Overall this was a fascinating experiment and while I sadly did fail at unlocking doors from my laptop I do feel more confident with reverse engineering app requests now! The next step would probably be to grab the app bundle and try to decompile it looking for the URLs we saw, but I don’t have a mac on me, and I’ve never done that before. Next post?

Taking inspiration from the LOW←TECH MAGAZINE I will be taking any questions / comments about this article via email and then posting them here to my site! If you have a question or comment, feel free to email me at me@dunkirk.sh. Now to go eat breakfast :)

Section Headers

Sections headers (prefixed with ## in markdown) are the main content separators for posts, and can be linked to directly. To link to them, the header’s text needs to be kebab-cased, so the above would be #section-headers.

Not quite a section header, the <!-- more --> tag is used to indicate where a post should be split for rss purposes. This should generally be right after the first paragraph.

Table of Contents

Section and sub-headers can be used to generate a table of contents at the start of the page. To enable this feature for a post, add the following to the page’s frontmatter:

toml

[extra]
has_toc = true

The table of contents will only ever be generated for ## and ### headers. I don’t particularly love the look of it and tend to write shorter posts so I hardly use it.

Embedding Code

I tend to do this alot so this is an important bit of the blog. All code blocks with a code type are progressively enhanced with a copy button.

Syntax Highlighting

If you want syntax coloring, you put the name of the programming language immediately after the ticks. So writing this:

```rust
fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}
```

Will produce this:

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

Code Block Title

Sometimes it can help to give a header to a code block to signal what it represents. To do this, you put a single-line block quote immediately before the code block. So by prepending the following code with > src/index.ts, I can produce this:

src/index.ts

Bun.serve({
  port: 3000,
  fetch(req) {
    return new Response("Hello, world!");
  }
});

Inline Code

As seen above, sometimes code items are mentioned in regular paragraphs, but you want to draw attention to them. To do this, you can wrap it in back-tick (`) quotes. For example, if I wanted to mention Rust’s Vec<T> type.

`Vec<T>`

You can wrap a link around a code tag if you want to link to the docs, for example I could link to the Option<T>::take_if method directly.

[`Option<T>::take_if`](https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/option/enum.Option.html#method.take_if)

Block Quotes

I can display a quote by prepending multiple lines of text with > like so, which will wrap it in a blockquote tag:

“This text will appear italicized in a quote box!”

Cited Quotations

For when I want to have a citation, I can use the html <cite> tag after the quote text and it will prepend it with a nice — em dash.

“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

Bilbo Baggins

Embedding Media

Images and videos are a great way to break up content and prevent text fatigue.

Images

Images can be embedded using the usual markdown syntax:

![alt text](/path/to/image.png)

When there are multiple paragraphs of text in a row (usually 3-4), and nothing else to break them up, images can be interspersed to help prevent text-wall fatique.

You can also add captions to images:

{{ img(id="https://url.com/image.png" alt="alt text" caption="this can be ommited if you want or added! It's optional :)") }}

You can also display multiple images side-by-side using the imgs shortcode with comma-separated URLs:

{{ imgs(id="https://url.com/image1.png, https://url.com/image2.png" alt="alt text 1, alt text 2" caption="optional caption for both images") }}

Videos

To embed a video, you use the youtube(id="", autoplay?=bool) shortcode e.g.

Bluesky posts

This is handled by a shortcode bluesky(post="") and takes the post url as a parameter. These will automatically attach images and videos.

First Day of summer is an annual public holiday in Iceland that is celebrated on the first Thursday after 18 April (some time between 19 and 25 April). It is a celebration of the start of the first summer month (Harpa) of the old Icelandic calendar. #Iceland #EastCoastKin #Photography #Summer

@svenninifl.bsky.social

Miscellaneous

You can also create <hr> horizontal rule tags using --- in markdown, like so:

But these should be used sparingly, if at all.

You can also use emojis inline from the hackclub slack like this :yay:! This is just done by writing :emoji: and it gets progressively enhanced with a bit of js as long as the emoji is in cachet!

Callouts

Callouts are a great way to draw attention to important information. They come in several types:

Info Callout

Warning Callout

Danger Callout

Tip Callout

Note Callout

Custom Title

I eventually decided to just try and remove the SSD from the MacBook and see if there was a way to recover any files from it (spoiler: there kinda is, but it’s annoying) but I couldn’t find any guide online and iFixit had nothing. So I decided to just try and yolo it and see if I could figure it out on my own, and surprisingly I actually managed to do it! Turns out, the process isn’t that hard! I’ll take you through the steps I took so that if you want to do this, it’s much less of a hassle.

Guide

1. the first thing you need to do is to remove the screws from the back of your MacBook. This will use a P5 Pentalobe driver, which I believe you can buy from iFixit as well as several other companies on Amazon.

   

2. next you need to crack open the shell of the MacBook by prying under the front (on the side where the MacBook opens). It’s pretty helpful to have a suction cup or something to lift it up a bit so you can get your prying tool underneath (I used a flat plastic prying tool I got from the battery repair kit for this MacBook, but a guitar pick or credit card would probably also work)

   

3. now once you’ve got the back slightly opened up just run around the edge of the shell prying up on it until the front and two sides are free then just pull forward at a slight (15ish degree?) angle, and it should slide right out.

   

4. once it’s open, locate the silver metal block looking thing; this is your SSD

   

5. now using a T5 Torx driver (why couldn’t you just use one type of screws apple 😭; be more like framework) you need to unscrew the two screws on either side of the front of the SSD

   

6. now comes the slightly scary part (for me at least) you need to lift the black tape that’s covering the top of the SSD (don’t worry the SSD will be fine)

   

7. now just slightly pull on the SSD (again at a slight angle) and it should pop right out!

   

Postlog and notes

I hope this helped if you are trying to do this your self! Now for recovering the data the two options I’ve found are a) buy a secondary MacBook of the exact same generation and model and swap your SSD in or b) pay some data recovery company a lot of money to probably do the same thing for you; neither option is super appealing to me, so I’ll keep searching for alternatives and I will be sure to update this article if I do find any. As of today though (August 3rd 2024) I haven’t been able to get a hold of another MacBook or adaptor to connect this to my computer but if you do find one definitely leave a comment on the hacker news post linked below!

• Posted on HackerNews on 2024-08-03 hn://item/41147359
• Republished to this blog on 2024-10-31 with minor edits

1. Download and install the Monaspace font:

First visit https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace/releases/latest and download the zip. Next to install the Monaspace font:

• On macOS, drag the font files into font book.
• For windows, drag into the font window in settings.
• For Linux, clone the repo and run: cd util; ./install_linux.sh

2. Configure VS Code

Install the Custom CSS and JS Loader plugin. Set the font to one of the following options: Monaspace Neon Var, Monaspace Argon Var, Monaspace Xeon Var, Monaspace Radon Var, or Monaspace Krypton Var.

• You will find this option under Editor: Font Family in the user preferences

Next enable font ligatures in the settings.json with following snippet:

settings.json

"editor.fontLigatures": "'ss01', 'ss02', 'ss03', 'ss04', 'ss05', 'ss06', 'ss07', 'ss08', calt', 'dlig'",

Now enable the custom CSS file within the settings.json, modifying the file path for Windows / MacOS / Linux if needed:

still settings.json

"vscode_custom_css.imports": [
    "file:///Users/{{user}}/.vscode/style.css", // for mac (remove if not mac)
    "file://C://Users/{{user}}/vscode/style.css" // for windows (remove if not windows)
    "file:///home/{{user}}/.vscode/style.css" // for linux (remove if not windows)
],

3. Create custom CSS file at the path you specified above.

Depending on your VS Code version, the class names might be different, so you may need to use the developer tools to find the correct one. The styles that worked for me on VS Code version: 1.84.2 (Universal) commit: 1a5daa3a0231a0fbba4f14db7ec463cf99d7768e are here:

style.css

/* Comment Class */
.mtk3 {
    font-family: "Monaspace Radon Var";
    font-weight: 500;
}

/* Copilot Classes */
.ghost-text-decoration {
    font-family: "Monaspace Krypton Var";
    font-weight: 200;
}

.ghost-text-decoration-preview {
    font-family: "Monaspace Krypton Var";
    font-weight: 200;
}

Thanks to @fspoettel on GitHub for this trick to get the copilot classes when in dev mode

“You can inspect transient DOM elements by halting the app with a debugger after a delay with a debugger call inside a setTimeout.”

@fspoettel

You can copy the following snippet to do just that!

console

setTimeout(() => {
    debugger;
}, 10000);

Before you are finished make sure you have run the Enable Custom CSS and JS command from the command bar.

Closing Remarks

That should be it! Hopefully you will have a beautiful custom font VS Code install.

If you are looking for a good theme, I can highly recommend the Catppuccin theme, as that is what I use myself. Be sure to check out Monaspace’s website as it is a work of art. Happy Coding! 👩‍💻

• Updated 2024-08-22: changed mtk4 to mtk3 on the feedback of mutammim
• Updated 2024-10-31: changed around the formatting of the post and moved to dunkirk.sh

In the last few years, we have seen a wave of “online safety bills” created by lawmakers that will ostensibly help protect children online. The US has the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act (PKSMA, S.1291) and the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA, S.1409) while in the UK they have the Online Safety Bill (OSB). The main feature that all of these bills have in common is the censorship of online content for minors. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has raised concerns over KOSA, saying, “The bill requires all websites, apps, and online platforms to filter and block legal speech” (Mullin). These bills raise an important question–should the government regulate the online activities of children, or should that responsibility lie solely with parents?

The bills above all propose different methods of regulating online content, but they all contain a united mission to “protect children online.” KOSA has four regulatory pieces. One of them is the legal duty for platforms to prevent certain harms including “promotion of self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and other matters that pose a risk to the physical and mental health of a minor” (“Text - S.1409”). This would cover any platform that is “reasonably likely to be used” (“Text - S.1409”) by a minor, and would be supplemented with strict parental controls required by default. As writers from the EFF pointed out, as a result of the broad language the potential impact could be very wide, affecting teaching on subjects such as gun ownership, Christianity, racism, substance abuse, eating disorders, and depression to name a few (Kelley) (Mullin). As Sarah Philips, organizer of Fight for the Future, so aptly, put it, “We don’t live in a country where there is a consensus about what is harmful to children, so how could the government determine what’s appropriate for every kid” (qtd. in Molloy)?

KOSA would also compel platforms to provide data to researchers and implement an elaborate age-verification system. This age verification clause is a problem because children could be made federal criminals and/or be fined, or imprisoned for up to five years, for circumventing the system (Weissmann). A survey by Internet Matters of services with a minimum age of 13, revealed that of 1000 11-15-year-olds, 62% of 11-year-olds and 69% of 12-year-olds have a Facebook profile, 36% of 11-year-olds and 57% of 12-year-olds use Instagram, 22% of 11-year-olds and 41% of 12-year-olds own a Snapchat account. In addition, 50% of the children surveyed had a WhatsApp account, which has a minimum age of 16.

PKSMA would go even further than KOSA by prohibiting kids under 13 from using social media at all and requiring any minor under 18 to have parental permission to create an account. To enforce the age limit, the government would create a digital ID system and companies would be required to use the system to verify users. While the system is still being developed, and we don’t have definite information on how it would work, we do know that the program would be implemented as a barrier to creating an account. As a result, it would restrict access to platforms and services from people who don’t have a form of government identification. According to a Brennan Center study of voting age adults, this could negatively affect 11% of Americans, potentially higher when minors, and undocumented immigrants are included. Considering that these platforms are worldwide, the problem of having to create a global digital ID system or more likely a location system is encountered. This would be difficult to implement as a location based system can easily be tricked, and a global digital ID is unlikely.

The OSB from the UK has the same digital ID and content censorship requirements as the other two bills but contains an even scarier proposal: government mandated surveillance of every message, post, or piece of content generated by users. This would effectively kill end-to-end encryption and generate massive safety risks for those that use online services to avoid persecution or censorship in their countries. The response given by the House of Lords against the furious pushback has been, according to the EFF, “to wave its hands and deny reality. … the U.K.’s Minister for Culture, Media and Sport simply re-hashes an imaginary world in which messages can be scanned while user privacy is maintained” (Mullin, “The UK Government”).

A potential obstacle to these bills, however, is that the restriction of content for minors is unlawful. In the USA, the First Amendment, a key piece of our civil liberties since 1791 as a part of the Bill of Rights, protects the right to free speech with these words: “Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech.” For the rest of the world, the ICCPR, developed by the United Nations to protect freedoms globally, states in Article 19: “Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice” (“International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights”). Neither of these provide a qualifying age factor. As the Supreme Court stated in the case Planned Parenthood v. Danforth: “Constitutional rights do not mature and come into being magically only when one attains the state-defined age of majority. Minors, as well as adults, are protected by the Constitution and possess constitutional rights” (Planned Parenthood v. Danforth, 428 U.S. 52 (1976)).

In Modern Socio-Technical Perspectives on Privacy, the authors say, “young people place great social value on their online privacy and want policies that are fair and negotiable.” and in addition, “The use of online surveillance … can undermine trust and hinder relationship building” (Wisniewski et al.). This is specifically speaking of the relationship between parent and child, but more broadly can be extrapolated to the government. We don’t want the next generation of our youth to grow up feeling like the government doesn’t trust them or their parents to regulate their information intake. Youth won’t be able to learn and grow from interacting with others online if the government walls it off.

Many of the systems that lawmakers are trying to put in place might not be effective. “According to Yardi and Bruckman, teens—who often have greater knowledge and skills … in applying technology workarounds—may rebel against … rules and engage in riskier behaviors to avoid technology constraints” (Wisniewski et al.). This could mean that the main effect of those laws would be to censor the content of everyone using social platforms, while completely failing to keep minors off social media.

In summary, these bills all have the same stated goal: to protect minors online, a laudable goal. The way lawmakers are trying to do this, however, creates many harmful implications both for minors and for adults. We don’t need the government to make decisions on what content is or isn’t acceptable or what age they should be allowed to use services. Instead, I would propose that the government help provide tools and resources that parents are not obliged to use, but which they may use to help their children better understand and navigate the online world.

Works Cited

Brennan Center. Citizens Without Proof. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-without-proof. Accessed 27 Sept. 2023.

“International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” OHCHR, https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-civil-and-political-rights. Accessed 27 Sept. 2023.

Internet Matters. “Should Social Media Use Age Verification?” Internet Matters, 13 June 2016, https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/expert-opinion/digital-doormen-dont-ask-for-id/.

Kelley, Jason. “The Kids Online Safety Act Is Still A Huge Danger to Our Rights Online.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2 May 2023, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/kids-online-safety-act-still-huge-danger-our-rights-online.

Molloy, Parker. Congress Is About to Pass a Very Bad Internet Bill. Here’s How You Can Stop It. 2 June 2022, https://www.readtpa.com/p/congress-is-about-to-pass-a-very.

Mullin, Joe. “Congress Amended KOSA, But It’s Still A Censorship Bill.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 10 Aug. 2023, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/congress-amended-kosa-its-still-censorship-bill.

-–. “The UK Government Knows How Extreme The Online Safety Bill Is.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 8 Sept. 2023, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/uk-government-knows-how-extreme-online-safety-bill.

“Planned Parenthood v. Danforth, 428 U.S. 52 (1976).” Justia Law, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/428/52/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2023.

“Text - S.1409 - 118th Congress (2023-2024): Kids Online Safety Act.” Congress.gov, Library of Congress, 27 July 2023, https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1409/text.

Weissmann, Shoshana. “Regimes That Run Age Verification through the Government Would Allow Prosecutors to Make Children Federal Criminals If They Lie about Their Age.” R Street Institute, https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/regimes-that-run-age-verification-through-the-government-would-allow-prosecutors-to-make-children-federal-criminals-if-they-lie-about-their-age/. Accessed 14 Sept. 2023.

Wisniewski, Pamela J., et al. “Privacy in Adolescence.” Modern Socio-Technical Perspectives on Privacy, edited by Bart P. Knijnenburg et al., Springer International Publishing, 2022, pp. 315–36. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82786-1_14.

• Written on 2023-11-01 and republished to this blog on 2024-10-31

This widget interested me because it allowed me to call any webhook I wanted utilizing the onboard Wi-Fi as well as through the Connect IQ app. This was a very important feature for me because I can’t get the app to run on LineageOS as it keeps asking for the location permission even though it was already granted.

My first idea was to try to broadcast a message to the Google home using ismarslomic/google-assistant-broadcast, but it ended up being broken. I decided, therefore, that since the project was unmaintained to try Home Assistant with the Google Assistant SDK.

The setup was amazingly quick, using the linuxserver/docker-homeassistant image and their sample compose file, I was able to get it fully running in under 10 minutes.

Now for the Google Assistant SDK / APICall / Home Assistant tutorial. The first thing you want to do is follow this guide, Google Assistant SDK - Home Assistant, to install the Assistant SDK. Once you have completed that, go to Settings / Automations & Services.

This is where you can create the action that you want to trigger with your smartwatch. The first thing you need to do is to create a new automation. Save and name the automation you just created. Now add a trigger, scroll to the bottom of the list and select webhook. If done successfully, it will look like the image below.

Now add an action. I decided to use the media player to play a song on Spotify. Also go back to the webhook section and click the settings icon next to the webhook ID. Change the settings to reflect below screenshot.

Now for the fun part. Download APICall onto your Garmin smartwatch and go to the configuration section for the app.

Note: I’ll be using Garmin Express on my MacBook, but you can also use the Garmin Connect app on a phone.

If you are using Garmin Express, then you can access the app settings by selecting the 3 dots next to the app. You will have 36 possible API calls that you can enter.

webhooks

{deviceName: "Broadcast",actionName: "Chores",url: "http://192.168.40.21:8123/api/webhook/Aere",method: "GET",headers:"{"Content-Type":"application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}"}
{deviceName: "Spotify",actionName: "Discover Weekly",url: "http://192.168.40.21:8123/api/webhook/-djNd5aMidD6Q3w2jgYDu50ix",method: "GET",headers:"{"Content-Type":"application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}",actionIcon:40}
{deviceName: "Spotify",actionName: "Liked Songs",url: "http://192.168.40.21:8123/api/webhook/liked-songs-6TrVEY-TzVsAeFX8Mt8FUpJN",method: "GET",headers:"{"Content-Type":"application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}",actionIcon:40}
{deviceName: "Spotify",actionName: "Sleep Songs",url: "http://192.168.40.21:8123/api/webhook/sleep-songs-jA1nrTpc9PuKumvzNDFteBDK",method: "GET",headers:"{"Content-Type":"application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}",actionIcon:51}
{deviceName: "Media Controls",actionName: "Play/Pause",url: "http://192.168.40.21:8123/api/webhook/playpause-DTNDt-RzOqgGTggOnV_sXMLm",method: "GET",headers:"{"Content-Type":"application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}",actionIcon:43}
{deviceName: "Media Controls",actionName: "Next",url: "http://192.168.40.21:8123/api/webhook/skip-forward-IvQkjhn2oev7VY0mb_xZDDCK",method: "GET",headers:"{"Content-Type":"application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}",actionIcon:41}
{deviceName: "Media Controls",actionName: "Previous",url: "http://192.168.40.21:8123/api/webhook/skip-backwards-A9byoXP-QwSv_aoQ2FtX-_Qx",method: "GET",headers:"{"Content-Type":"application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}",actionIcon:42}

These are the actions that I configured for my watch so far. To customize for your API calls you need to change the deviceName, actionName, and url fields. The method and headers need to stay the same across all actions. If you want to add an icon to that action, then you can configure that with the actionIcon field. A table with the possible icons is included below, sourced from APICall’s documentation.

In conclusion, you can use APICall to trigger actions in home assistant from your Garmin smartwatch. I hope this tutorial proved to be useful, and have a great rest of your day (or night).

• Written on 2023-08-04 and republished to this blog on 2024-10-31

Introduction

To install TrueNAS Core on Proxmox you need three things:

1. A copy of Proxmox — A complete, open-source server management platform for enterprise virtualization.
2. A TrueNAS CORE ISO — World’s #1 NAS Operating System
3. HDDs — You can use whatever you want, but I will be using three Barracuda ES 750GB drives

Install TrueNAS Core

Sign-in to Proxmox and upload your ISO to the local storage or, download the file directly from the link using the built-in ISO fetcher.

Next to create the VM, the only thing that needs to be changed from the defaults is the memory, which I set to 8192 MB (8 GB).

Now finish creating the VM and click on the VM after it is created. Go to options and enable start at boot.

Next, we need to pass through the physical drives to the VM. Open a terminal on the Proxmox server (use the built-in terminal or ssh in) and run the following command. Only run the part after the #.

root@thespia:~# lsblk -o +MODEL,SERIAL

NAME                           MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT MODEL                   SERIAL
sda                              8:0    0 698.6G  0 disk            ST3750330NS             9QK2GT8R
sdb                              8:16   0 698.6G  0 disk            ST3750640NS             3QD0AYE0
sdc                              8:32   0 698.6G  0 disk            ST3750640NS             3QD0BQ5G
sdd                              8:48   1 111.8G  0 disk            Hitachi_HTS543212L9SA02 090130FBEB00LGGJ35RF
├─sdd1                           8:49   1  1007K  0 part
├─sdd2                           8:50   1   512M  0 part /boot/efi
└─sdd3                           8:51   1 111.3G  0 part
    ├─pve-swap                   253:0    0     8G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
    ├─pve-root                   253:1    0  37.8G  0 lvm  /
    ├─pve-data_tmeta             253:2    0     1G  0 lvm
    │ └─pve-data-tpool           253:4    0  49.6G  0 lvm
    │   ├─pve-data               253:5    0  49.6G  1 lvm
    │   ├─pve-vm--100--cloudinit 253:6    0     4M  0 lvm
    │   └─pve-vm--101--cloudinit 253:7    0     4M  0 lvm
    └─pve-data_tdata             253:3    0  49.6G  0 lvm
    └─pve-data-tpool           253:4    0  49.6G  0 lvm
        ├─pve-data               253:5    0  49.6G  1 lvm
        ├─pve-vm--100--cloudinit 253:6    0     4M  0 lvm
        └─pve-vm--101--cloudinit 253:7    0     4M  0 lvm
sde                              8:64   0 465.8G  0 disk            WDC_WD5000AAKS-65YGA0   WD-WCAS83511331
├─sde1                           8:65   0 465.8G  0 part
└─sde9                           8:73   0     8M  0 part
zd0                            230:0    0    32G  0 disk
├─zd0p1                        230:1    0   100M  0 part
├─zd0p2                        230:2    0    16M  0 part
├─zd0p3                        230:3    0  31.4G  0 part
└─zd0p4                        230:4    0   522M  0 part
zd16                           230:16   0    80G  0 disk
├─zd16p1                       230:17   0     1M  0 part
└─zd16p2                       230:18   0    80G  0 part
zd32                           230:32   0     4M  0 disk
zd48                           230:48   0    80G  0 disk
├─zd48p1                       230:49   0     1M  0 part
└─zd48p2                       230:50   0    80G  0 part
zd64                           230:64   0     1M  0 disk
zd80                           230:80   0    32G  0 disk

In my server sda, sdb, and sdc are my drives. I can tell because they have no partitions and are 698.6G. Next, based on the serial numbers of the disks, find the dev/disk/by-id of the drive.

root@thespia:~# ls /dev/disk/by-id/

ata-Hitachi_HTS543212L9SA02_090130FBEB00LGGJ35RF
ata-Hitachi_HTS543212L9SA02_090130FBEB00LGGJ35RF-part1
ata-Hitachi_HTS543212L9SA02_090130FBEB00LGGJ35RF-part2
ata-Hitachi_HTS543212L9SA02_090130FBEB00LGGJ35RF-part3
ata-ST3750330NS_9QK2GT8R
ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0AYE0
ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0BQ5G
ata-WDC_WD5000AAKS-65YGA0_WD-WCAS83511331
ata-WDC_WD5000AAKS-65YGA0_WD-WCAS83511331-part1
ata-WDC_WD5000AAKS-65YGA0_WD-WCAS83511331-part9
dm-name-pve-root
dm-name-pve-swap
dm-name-pve-vm--100--cloudinit
dm-name-pve-vm--101--cloudinit
dm-uuid-LVM-i2jw2DEc8aJxdhf3mg7sAcAbc57lfeNL967xBhsO2KsTDqSJ5KB9pGqef5HjQJHk
dm-uuid-LVM-i2jw2DEc8aJxdhf3mg7sAcAbc57lfeNLQ6hkWGll1H38yFz0ty3RmmJPSRSbj1sa
dm-uuid-LVM-i2jw2DEc8aJxdhf3mg7sAcAbc57lfeNLrSofGgZtL41un6baoCpRHunOrbJeMTeO
dm-uuid-LVM-i2jw2DEc8aJxdhf3mg7sAcAbc57lfeNLWPjyk8d4ik2D6KIcp2zaugdFsHB4TNOM
lvm-pv-uuid-pRECVX-zqKA-evrD-PNof-sTYg-zNrD-WUelFe
usb-Generic-_Multi-Card_20120926571200000-0:0
wwn-0x5000c50015a53388
wwn-0x5000cca562c751e4
wwn-0x5000cca562c751e4-part1
wwn-0x5000cca562c751e4-part2
wwn-0x5000cca562c751e4-part3
wwn-0x50014ee2ab77b23f
wwn-0x50014ee2ab77b23f-part1
wwn-0x50014ee2ab77b23f-part9

In my case, the ID of the drives I want are ata-ST3750330NS_9QK2GT8, ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0AYE0, and ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0BQ5G.

Now find your VM_ID, mine is 102.

Run the following command, replacing the VM_ID and DISK_ID with yours.

root@thespia:~# qm set VM_ID -scsi1 /dev/disk/by-id/DISK_ID

root@thespia:~# qm set 102 -scsi1 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3750330NS_9QK2GT8R
update VM 102: -scsi1 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3750330NS_9QK2GT8R
root@thespia:~# qm set 102 -scsi2 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0AYE0
update VM 102: -scsi2 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0AYE0
root@thespia:~# qm set 102 -scsi3 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0BQ5G
update VM 102: -scsi3 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3750640NS_3QD0BQ5G

Here is how it appears in Proxmox:

If everything went well, then you can start your VM now. After it finishes booting up, you will get the screen below. Make sure Install/Upgrade is selected and hit enter.

You will then get this screen, use space to select the first drive and hit enter.

Hit enter one last time and enter your password.

Select BIOS, as this is the default mode for Proxmox VMs.

After about five to ten minutes, the installation process will finish and the VM will ask you to remove installation media and reboot.

Select the installation media and remove it with the top button, go back to the console and hit enter, which will take you back to the main menu. On the main menu, select reboot with the arrow keys and hit enter.

Once the machine restarts, it will display an IP address in the console.

Upon connecting to the IP address, you will get this screen. Use the root username and the password, previously configured, to login.

Once logged in, I updated the system using the button on the home screen.

I chose not to save the configuration file when prompted, proceeded to install the updates, and rebooted.

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial! My inspiration to make this came from watching “How to run TrueNAS on Proxmox?” by Christian Lempa. I encourage you to watch his video if you want a video guide to installing TrueNAS on Proxmox.

• Written on 2023-07-10 and republished to this blog (with minor edits) on 2024-10-31