Just another tech blag
I made a single acrylic sign for myself and as a test piece before I started making 5 of them for Christmas presents. Now that I’ve finished those 5, I have a few lessons that I learned along the way that my original sign didn’t shake out of my design and method.
Continue reading “Lessons from making 5 side lit signs”
Since I just finished my new EspDeck model that has backlit keys. I always intended on using these for notifying me of some state in my house so I can take action on it, ideally using the EspDeck itself. This is the first use case I had for the features so I’ll be implementing it so we can start making use of my fancy new NFC Deck to it’s fullest.
Continue reading “NfcDeck Backlit Key Notification”
The time has come for a new iteration of the EspDeck. This time it’ll include a few new features, and a new form factor. The new version will include all the features of the Tag Reader, original EspDeck, and a rotary encoder.
Continue reading “EspDeck w NFC: The NFCDeck”
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”