Jun 19 2019
Habitat for Humanity
Participated in my first Habitat for Humanity build yesterday. Hung drywall, I’m glad I participated but god do I hurt today. Gives me a new appreciate for people that do that kind of work as a living.
Jun 16 2019
Home Server
I must say, I am really liking unRAID on my home server. It is working great for what I need. Next steps for the server are to swap out the Core i7-4770 CPU, motherboard & RAM for dual Opteron 4280s, dual socket C32 board and 64GB of ECC RAM. At some point, I will get a Rosewill L-4500 case as well.
By Shaun • networking, Server • 0
Jun 10 2019
Pi-hole
I have decided to run Pi-hole at home again. I just got tired of all the ads making pages take forever to load. However, I have had to add some ad sites to the Whitelist just to get things working (I’m looking at you PBS Roku app). I may have gone overkill on what I block, but better safe than sorry. Especially because my kids are just about to the point of going online. If you’d like my lists, let me know and I can post them.
By Shaun • networking • 1
May 13 2019
Mothers Day
Well, we had a successful Mothers Day. My wife’s favorite present was our oldest son telling her that he wouldn’t wipe off any kisses for the entire day. I think her favorite present I gave her was either telling her to go lay down or replacing the radiator in her mini-van
May 7 2019
Weird Hobby
My wife loves her crocheting. No big deal and not that weird. Me being the good husband I am however decided to write an app that will allow her to quickly generate a temperature blanket pattern. For those that don’t know, a temperature blanket is where you assign a color to a temp or range of temps and then track the high or low temp for a year. You use that to determine what color each day will be. Also means that even with the same color mapping, each year would be a different pattern. I am close to done and I cannot wait to have her use it.
Apr 16 2019
Minor bike upgrades
Just picked up some minor “upgrades” for my bike. Specifically new tires to make it easier to commute on it. Got some Diamondback Hybrid/Comfort Tires. Should be a lot easier to commute with it. Also got some Schwalbe Bicycle Tire Levers to make it easier to swap between my street tires and offroad tires.
Mar 8 2019
Home Server & Network Updates
Well, due to Meraki not supporting IPv6 on their MX appliances I have removed it from my network. I am now back to running a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, specifically the EdgeRouter X SFP. With a 1Gbe Fiber link between it and my Meraki MS220-8P just because I can (everything purchased from http://fs.com and working great). I have also replaced my Meraki MR33 AP with a Cambium e410 AP that I got for free. While it is still a cloud managed AP (for now at least as I have yet to get the on-premise controller working in KVM) there is no license fee which is nice. Although the cnMaestro software is a little harder to navigate than Meraki’s, I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it.
On the home server front, right now I have unRAID running on an Intel Core i7-4770 in a ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with 24GB of RAM. This will soon be upgraded to dual AMD Opteron 4280s in an ASUS KCMA-D8 motherboard with 128GB of RAM. I got gifted the motherboard, and the processors and RAM were very cheap. Just waiting on the adapters to be able to mount Socket AM3 HSFs on the board, the HSFs themselves & a new PSU as my current 500w one will not be big enough to power everything. The i7, its motherboard & RAM will go into our gaming desktop, giving it a nice upgrade from an i5-2500 & 8GB of RAM.
Nov 8 2018
New Home Server
Well,
I have come to the conclusion that I am in need of a new home server. My combination of a HP N40L for storage, a HP Laptop for Plex and a Raspberry Pi 3 as a Home Assistant machine just isn’t working well anymore. Of course, I can’t afford to go out and buy brand new gear (for the most part). I am considering “old” LGA 1356 Intel E5-2670 Xeons (around $80 each), a motherboard to support two of them, rackmount case (new Norco RPC-5224 and probably the most expensive part of the build), new PSU, an additional SAS/SATA controller so I can use the case properly, etc. Just need to determine if I want to do Ubuntu with ZOL & root on ZFS or if I want to go with FreeBSD and a beta install of Docker. I’ll run as much as I can outside of Docker containers, but some will need to be containers. I’m also thinking of putting the server in the garage, although I have no clue how hot it gets in there in the summer which worries me. I would love to be able to run two fiber runs out there to do a connection between my current Meraki MS220-8P and my old Dell PowerConnect 2724 (LAG between them just because I can), would also give me the ability to upgrade to 10Gig at some point in the future.
By Shaun • smart house, tech • 0
Oct 24 2018
Recursion Prime
Well,
I participated in my first Ingress Anomaly this last weekend. Recursion Prime in Minneapolis. I had a blast, although I am out of shape for doing a bunch of short sprints on my mountain bike. For my next one, if I’m on a bike team again I really need a gravel bike or something like that instead of my mountain bike. Sadly we lost to the “Enlightened” but oh well.
Jun 19 2019
funtoo Linux
I’ve decided that I really have no reason to have Windows on my laptop since I don’t use it all that often so tonight I’m going to embark on installing funtoo Linux on it. It will most definitely be an interesting time but given the age of my laptop shouldn’t have to many surprises.
By Shaun • computers, tech • 0