services – Systems Lab

July 10, 2024July 10, 2024

Upgrading the Network Video Recorder

I’ve been using a small 1U server (Running an E3 V2 CPU) to run Blue Iris for a few years now, and in an attempt to find power savings in my electric bill (and subsequent AC savings too) I decided to do some digging for a replacement. I gathered some metrics on the old server and found it using 80-100 watts, so I was aiming to reduce that by 50%. I ended up finding a cute little 2 bay “NAS” online that supports a low power AMD CPU and can handle the HDD space I need for the video recordings.

February 26, 2024January 27, 2024

Upgrading my NextCloud to use Redis and fix Cron

I’ve had NextCloud installed for a while now and part of my core infrastructure, however it hasn’t been running well. I’ve always had issues getting the cron jobs to run and occasional problems with file locking in it. Recently the file locking problems got worse and I finally decided to fix both issues in one hopefully straightforward action.

October 16, 2023August 18, 2023

Using ntfy.sh to send unRAID notifications

unRAID supports multiple notification platforms for keeping you informed about what the server is doing, the only problem is, I don’t use any of those notification platforms. I have however started using ntfy.sh, which has been working well for my home assistant notifications, and is a very simple platform. What I’d like to do is integrate it into unRAID so that I can make use of it there as well.

October 2, 2023August 10, 2023

UnRAID XFS MetaData Corruption

One thing you never want to see when you look at the screen for your file server is an error about corrupted data. Let alone after seeing read errors from one of your disks during a parity check. I recently had that sort of fun with my NAS.

March 27, 2023February 12, 2023

Cleaning up the docker registry

Working on my docker swarm recently I noticed that my storage was running low. After investigation, I found I had 17GB of usage by my docker registry. I have no need to have that many versions of my custom built containers on hand, so I went through the process of cleaning it up.

February 13, 2023February 12, 2023

Setting up Giscus Comments on WordPress

This blog was setup originally in 2016 and has never had a really useful comments section. There was a time when the only thing showing up were trackbacks to malicious websites. This wasn’t exactly a positive addition, so I disabled trackbacks and commenting to prevent any misleading comments. I decided to try and get a comments section back and operational as a part of my overhaul of my webserver (and having recently learned of Giscus for using GitHub accounts and backend for commenting). So here we have a guide for setting up Giscus comments on WordPress.

December 20, 2021November 21, 2021

Upgrading Ubuntu Host for Unifi Controller

My unifi controller was installed on an Ubuntu server back on 16.04 LTS. This server finally reached end of life and I needed to run an upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I decided to first try to just release upgrade it two steps. I’d tried this in the past and failed which is why it stayed out of date for so long, but maybe the upgrade process was fixed for things to work automagically. I was a bit wrong on that, however I also found out that rebuilding from scratch is pretty easy.

December 6, 2021October 24, 2021

Stepping up Telegraf to Influx V2

Telegraf was the second service I stepped up to influxdb v2. With this service running on unraid, I’ll be able to start monitoring the system and get my dashboards back up and running. I have some other instances of telegraf that will need to be stepped up that are configured differently, but in this case, I’ll be working on my unraid instance first.

November 22, 2021October 17, 2021

Stepping up Grafana to InfluxDB V2

With my InfluxDB V2 container setup, some tokens created, and buckets in place, its time to start stepping up services. The first service to be stepped up will of course be Grafana itself, so that once the other tools are stepped up, I can start using the dashboards again.

November 8, 2021October 17, 2021

Intro to InfluxDB V2

I have watchtower setup on my Unraid server to handle automatically updating all my docker containers. This is quite convenient, however it does come with some dangers. For instance, my InfluxDB instance recently updated to version 2. This version of influx has a brand new query language, authentication system, and much more. This also breaks all compatibility with my Telegraf, Unifi-Poller, Grafana, and other services. Instead of trying to revert to an older version and refuse the slow change of technology, I decided to just start stepping up services to work with the new version. So I know get to introduce myself to InfluxDB V2 and then to move on to stepping up services to use it.