Just another tech blag
In working on a new variant in my EspDeck line of devices, I need a controller with more flash space, and so I look at the Esp32 controllers, and their 4mb flash models. This is a bit of my frustrations in getting them setup.
Continue reading “Flashing a Lolin32 with EspHome”
It’s always fun being able to use my 3d printer for my lab, and since I got a new server to replace my virtual host, it’s time to do so again! I plan on printing out a 1u rack mount unit for the Dell mini PC that I’m replacing my giant 4u virtual host with.
Continue reading “Rack mount mini PC 3d Print”
I’ve had a proxmox server for a few years that has been a workhorse for me, however it’s getting to be that time to replace it with newer more power efficient hardware. The process is relatively straight forward assuming you don’t have any problems with hardware failure during the process.
Continue reading “Migrating Proxmox Servers”
I installed some new z-wave light switches recently and when working on one of them, I encountered a very peculiar problem, the light would turn on for one second, then flash off and back on again, repeating this constantly. I was unsure what was going on since I thought I had wired the switch correctly.
The switch box had 3 wires, 2 going up and out one side, and a third going up and out the other. This was in a closet with 2 lights in it, so I figured the two were for the lights and the third was for the incoming power. I was quite wrong. The two were for the incoming power (incoming power and the rest of that breaker) and the third was for the two overhead lights.
With it wired up correctly this time, the switch turned on and off correctly, no flashing on and off. I hadn’t seen a smart switch do this before, but now I know it was from receiving the line and the load.
So recently my unraid webui has been running slowly, sometimes not showing the list of drives for a minute or two, or not at all. This finally culminated in an http 500 internal server error when I tried to load the main page. This isn’t good, and I was still able to access the server over ssh and via smb/nfs, so it wasn’t completely dead.
Time to debug over ssh. I first went to top and saw that shfs was at 100%+ CPU usage. This felt like an odd program to be using more than one CPU core of performance. I then went to the syslogs and saw lots of failed login attempts from a specific IP address. This wasn’t one I recognized, but I thought it might be a container I’m running (unraid api specifically).
I then went and ran docker ps to get the list of containers, and more importantly, the name for my unraid API container. I then ran docker inspect on that container and found it had the IP in question. Finally I went and ran docker kill on the container and the unraid webui started responding again. I guess I had misconfigured the container so it was falling to login, and retrying aggressively enough to stall out the webui.
Note to self, apps that scrape the webui should be configured correctly or else they may have some unintended consequences.
I got a new host for my proxmox server recently, a used sff PC that I upgraded the RAM in. It seemed to be a pretty neat little box with what should be the same amount of CPU horsepower as my beefy dual CPU system. I did however run into a big network problem that basically made the NIC useless.
Continue reading “Proxmox Host Network Issues”
Recently I restarted my journey towards a self hosted photos system again. This time I was planning on trying it immich. Immich provides a docker compose file to startup their entire stack of 6+ containers, which I wanted to run on unraid that lacks compose in the default configuration. Queue journey to get docker compose capabilities on unraid.
Continue reading “Docker Compose on Unraid”
I’ve had a few times now where I can’t grab a new container image to startup due to their rates limits on docker hub. This has been quite annoying, and there is a free plan for double the image pulls. Here is how you can login on unraid and setup the go file so it persists between reboots.
Continue reading “Docker Hub Login on Unraid”
I like to do some funny things from time to time, and I learned that adding XKCD to my home assistant dashboard is pretty simple. So what am I going to do, of course I’m going to add the current days XKCD to my home assistant dashboard!
Continue reading “XKCD in Home Assistant”
Now that I have a CO2 laser available, it opens up some new things that I can do, like cutting and engraving clear acrylic. Adding some side lighting to that and we can make a pretty sweet sign. I also plan on making a few more of these for gifts, so this first one is my experiment piece to try out all the techniques needed.
Continue reading “Making LED Acrylic Signs”