busybee fluffy rambles

I’ve reorganized my bedroom and as part of it I decided to finally address the ongoing issues with my audio setup in there. I have an old AirPort Express which I was using as an AirPlay receiver so that I could play music and podcasts and such on the (rather nice) hi-fi speakers, but it’s been super unreliable as of late, and even when it does remain connected, it generates random popping noises on the speakers — not great when I’m trying to sleep!

So anyway I was looking up various aftermarket AirPlay receivers, and most of them are pretty expensive, but then I realized that there’s probably a way of receiving AirPlay on a Raspberry Pi, and yes, there is, and then just as I was about to look for used Raspberry Pis to install this on, I remembered I already have a Raspberry Pi, in my bedroom, in the very same nightstand I would be putting a new one in: because I have SOMA’s older smart shades which use a rebadged Raspberry Pi as their Bluetooth-to-HomeKit bridge.

And the SOMA Connect image is just running Linux (specifically Rasbian 10) and some proprietary software.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Here’s the stuff going on with me I guess.

Warning: ornery and cantankerous.

Any Linux system that’s exposed to the world tends to get a lot of hack attempts at it. I’ve typically run fail2ban on mine to try to mitigate this, but on Ubuntu 20.04 I was unable to get it to actually detect various attempts.

There are a lot of tutorials out there for fail2ban in general and even several on older versions of Ubuntu, but there’s one slight change on 20.04 (or maybe even an earlier version) which makes them not work. After a lot of hair-pulling I found one particular tutorial which had, buried almost in the marginalia, the magic thing I needed to get it working: basically, you need to use the systemd log scanning backend, as none of the others seem to actually have access to the logs themselves, at least not without a lot of hassle.

So, the short version: add backend = systemd to the [DEFAULT] section of /etc/fail2ban/jail.local. But read on for some sshd configuration notes as well!