How to – Systems Lab

February 24, 2025January 10, 2025

Unraid Disk Shown as “New Device” When Its Full of Data

While working on setting up my new hardware and bringing my unraid pool back online on it, I encountered an odd problem that made me sweat. I started my array and immediately it gave an error that the cache drive failed. This was odd since that drive was fine just before I started installing the new hardware, so what changed now. I stopped the array and looked, and it was no longer assigned as the cache drive. When I went and added it to the cache again, unraid claimed it was a “new drive” and would be wiped when the array was started.

This was very wrong, this wasn’t a new cache drive, it was the same one as before. It also has a large amount of data on it that I’d like to keep, and docker settings. So I had to figure out how to tell unraid that the drive was fine and to just use it.

I found out that this was one of the situations the “new config” option was added to the tools for. So I went to tools -> new config and applied it while saving the disk locations in the pool. I double checked them after applying the new config, went to the main page, and checked the box stating that the parity should be assumed correct. After starting the array, everything was in order again. All my containers started, data was all there, and everything was back working again.

February 17, 2025January 10, 2025

Moving a View between two Home Assistant Dashboards

I decided to reorganize my home assistant dashboards which culminated in adding a new dashboard and moving a number of views from other dashboards to it. What I didn’t realize was that this wasn’t as easy as going into the UI and hitting copy on the view, though it wasn’t hard to do in the end (basically one more step and then hitting copy).

February 10, 2025December 3, 2024

Updating the Webserver to Ubuntu 24.04

I upgraded my webserver to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS recently and ran into an odd little issue. Apache2 refused to start up due to a PHP plugin failing to load. This was specifically PHP 8.1 failing to load as it was replaced in the repos with 8.3. This ended up having a quick fix to get things in order.

All I needed to do was disable the old PHP mod and enable the new one. I used this reference for which versions would be supported in 24.04 to enable the correct version. Overall a nice quick fix and my webserver was back operational

> sudo a2dismod php8.1
> sudo systemctl restart apache2
> sudo a2enmod php8.3
> sudo systemctl restart apache2

January 27, 2025November 18, 2024

BME680 and ESP

I’ve been trying to add some BME680 sensors to my IKEA air quality sensors. My goal was to add a bit more environmental sensors around my house to keep track of temperature, humidity, etc. In doing this I also ran into some odd problems with my D1 minis to work through.

January 20, 2025December 3, 2024

Putty Serial Connections to ESP Devices

While working on debugging an ESP32, I needed to get the log for the unit when WiFi was down. To do this I need a serial connection, which can be done using putty. Since this was the first time I used putty to connect to a serial device, I figured I’d give a short how to connect to an ESP32 using it.

December 30, 2024September 27, 2024

Finding Stuck Automations

I run into a case from time to time when I’m developing new automations where they end up hanging and stop responding. Since most of my automations are set to only allow one to run, this ends up causing future calls to it to fail since the hung iteration is still out there.

December 23, 2024September 27, 2024

ESPDeck 3 + LED Backlighting

Ever since I integrated per key LEDs in the NFC Deck, I have wanted to update the ESP Deck design to incorporate them (and update some of my keypads to include them too). I finally got around to both of these, swapping the switches for clear switches on one of my ESP Decks and integrating in the LED lighting.

December 2, 2024September 24, 2024

Flashing the ESP32 DevKit V1

On occasion, dealing with embedded hardware can be a bit of a pain. Flashing ESPs is a bit of guess and check from time to time. We’ll be flashing an ESP32 DevKit V2 today. We first need to install the drivers from here: CP210x USB to UART Bridge VCP Drivers – Silicon Labs (silabs.com)

With those installed, plug the USB connection for the controller into your PC (Close out of CURA too!), and from ESPHome web, connect to the COM port for the device. After that, hold down the boot button while selecting “Prepare for First Boot” in the ESPHome web interface, and keep holding it until you see the install begin running (getting the percentage complete, etc). Once that shows up, you can release the button and wait for it to finish flashing.

Tl-Dr

Install Driver
Plug in USB
Connect to COM Port from ESPHome Web
Hold Boot button while starting the install

November 25, 2024November 18, 2024

Fixing the WordPress App Connection to my site

It started out with the WordPress app stopping working for me on my phone. This happened a few months back as well and it stayed broken for a few months before it started working again. This time around I was rather very annoyed and wanted to figure out what was going wrong and fix it. In the end it came down to XML-RPC and an “optional” package in the WordPress health check.

November 8, 2024September 27, 2024

Backing up Git Repositories

We all rely quite a bit on cloud services that are hosted by faceless corporations, these are generally stable services, but if Google’s actions over the years have shown anything, it’s that these services can disappear overnight without warning. So I try to do cloud backups from time to time for the various services I rely on.