Purchased Second Unit

Posted on December 4, 2023 by larry

Got a second unit for testing.

First thing I did was to try and test a Windows install, unfortunately I had a bad drive and wasted a bunch of time trying to get it to work.

I found a good one and got it to work, and as expected Windows 10 registers itself.

Another thing I did was clear off my workbench, I put the sample unit on its own location out of the way, since it is headless now.

I did have to recover one of the working labs I screwed up. Wasn’t too bad, just needed to re ip, but to do that I needed to be physically connected with a monitor.

With that lab up, I realized all a forgot to do was reset the password. Kind of dumb mistake.

I picked up the new drive, and am going to set it up, probably as a static disk, with no LVM.

Still debating, may talk myself out of it.

Did workout in the gym, and I did get my fitbit steps.

Sleeping early, earned it.

Weight: 349.6

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Home Server Demo Built

Posted on December 3, 2023 by larry

I have the home server built, but am looking 1 more storage.

I have an on motherboard 250GB NVME drive, and a 1TB Internal 2.5 SATA.

Now I want an external disk for mass storage, so am waiting for a 4TB USB drive to come in.

Here are the services that are pretty much ready for use and configured.

• DHCP
• DNS
• NTP
• File Server (NAS Samba and NFS)
• Podman(Docker)
• DNS over HTTPS
• plex
• home assistant
• MATE/XRDP

Here are services that I have the bits installed but need to be configured

• Mail Server (postfix and dovecot)
• OpenVPN
• Nagios
• Grafana
• LDAP
• TFTP
• PXEBOOT via BIOS and UEFI

Finally Services or packages I need to install

• Certificate Services (via XCA)
• Influxdb
• Prometheus

I bit to go, but well on the way.

Weight: 348.4

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XMas Lights 2023

Posted on December 2, 2023 by larry

Got the lights done today, looks better then most year’s cause the lawn was actually cleared of leaves and we got more lights than usual.

Indoors is done too.

Season going to be good.

Weight: 348.4

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Plans For Home Server

Posted on December 1, 2023 by larry

Need a good demo for a home server.

This weekend is an ideal time to put one out. No games I am interested in on Sunday.

So I will work it out.

Gonna add plex and home assistant to this server as well.

Document later, just gonna do.

Luckily I got all the ansible playbooks already done.

Weight: 346.4

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New Home Server

Posted on November 30, 2023 by larry

Found this little gem of a machine at the local PC recycle store.

Recall this https://www.apolonio.com/blog/?p=9356

This one is interesting, I did add a 2.5″ hard drive, but it is cool in that includes everything else I need compared to a pi.

Couple things, it does include build in wifi, I am still looking but it looks to also have bluetooth.

Had to manually install iwl7260-firmware and NetworkManager-wifi

Looks like I can add another 8GB of RAM to increase it to 16GB.

The CPU is an i5-6500T CPU @ 2.50GHz which does support plex transcoding.

Another cool thing I didn’t realize is it supports NVME.

So in addition to SATA 2.5″ you can have a faster booting NVME.

As for USB, it has 6 USB3 ports.

finally, it draws between 5 and 20Watts (depending on what it is doing) so at worse case it would be about $20 per year to run continuously.

I am going to base my 2024 documentation on this.

Weight: 347.2

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Optimal Office Setup

Posted on November 29, 2023 by larry

I keep changing my office setup. Still trying to get everything setup where I want them to be.

I feel like a really need a small workspace for a desk.

Office is better though, meeting more of my needs and is a bit flexible.

I got 4 monitors off my PC right now.

Weight: 347.4

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Zoneminder Via Ansible

Posted on November 28, 2023 by larry

Mostly, I kickstart a build, then imported a a profile into the machine that included static IPs and sshd keys.

Another manual thing is to add my ssh keys via ssh-copy-id command. But everything is all ansible playbooks till I have a running nagios.

After that though I have to restore zoneminder data files by hand.

May want to not restore from backup and just move forward.

Not sure yet.

Also there was an issue with PHP and timezone, ended up putting timezone in the PHP file rather than the config file.

Weight: 348.8

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Eight Hours Sleep Does it

Posted on November 27, 2023 by larry

I know I went to bed around 11:30 last night and I woke up at closer to 8AM.

All do I felt great, although I was taken down by lunch.

But for most of the day I was going strong.

Got a lot done at work, in fact kept pushing thought to the evening.

Going to try and sleep early again too.

Weight: 347.8

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Awesome Weekend Recap

Posted on November 26, 2023 by larry

A lot of cool things happened this weekend, but wanted to put an important milestone first, not for me but my son.

He ran his first timed 1/2 marathon.

We left the house at 5:45AM to make it to the 7:30 start line, but we were rushed.

In the future maybe we should leave at 5AM. We did make it with 5 minutes to spare.

Couple other notes for my future self, bring a Cell Phone charger and pack, I ran through mine real quick for a reason. Another thing was dry clothes. It was cold and he was shivering pretty bad in the medical tent. I had three layers but could make due with 2. So I gave him my dry under shirt.

He ran it in 2:00:18 but he was clearly hurting at the end, but I think he vowed to do better next year and I vowed to join him.

Back to the weekend recap, got a lot done, First was of course Thanksgiving, house was cleaned pretty well.

Then was black Friday, I ordered some things like hard drives and a couple of Rack mount cases, to replace my backup server (maybe) and a zoneminder box (for sure)

Also celebrated a birthday, but Saturday was kind of chill, but did go to the Casino.

Did get most production machines backing up using URbackup

Sunday was this race as mentioned, but we also did our xmas photos and I got my fitbit steps.

Noticed the SSD in my ZM box kicked off some SMART errors.

I feel accomplished but tired.

Weight: 347.4

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Beginning of the End (of year)

Posted on November 25, 2023 by larry

With Thanksgiving behind me, it is now time to goal set for 2024, and do other end of year things.

I think since it is the Saturday between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I am going to call this procurement weekend, at least for 2023.

Looking at things to buy and set up for 2024 goals.

One of those is building the Rocky 9 Zoneminder server. I purchased the rack and hard drives.

Weight: 347.0

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