Disclaimer: no AI was used to write this article. If you run a DNS server at home or for an organisation, it is likely that you configured a public DNS server as a forwarder 1 . This is not required! Imagine we want to resolve the address 'wikipedia.org'. If no …
All major AI services like ChatGPT or Claude are heavily subsidised by investors. It's not just the initial investment — it's the running costs of these major AI services that are also astronomical. 1 At some point the money will run out. Assuming that Ed Zitron is right about his assessment …
Context I'm running a virtualisation lab environment, with four Intel-based CPUs (i5-6500) and one AMD Ryzen 3 PRO 2200GE. When migrating virtual machines from one of the Intel hosts to the AMD host, the migration would fail with the following error: error: operation failed: guest CPU doesn't match specification …
The problem Some time ago I worked with a customer that used Ansible to deploy a multitude of applications across their individual TAP 1 environments. Unfortunately the Ansible inventory was setup in such a way that group_vars variables for a specific application were manually duplicated across each TAP environment. Example …
Skip to the bottom two paragraph for instructions on how to replace the battery. I bought my Bose SoundLink on-ear Bluetooth headphones for 250 Euros around 2017 and I really like them. They are small, light, comfortable and can easily fit in a coat pocket when folded. Up until now …
My 4U 71 TiB ZFS NAS built with twenty-four 4 TB drives is over 10 years old and still going strong. Although now on its second motherboard and power supply, the system has yet to experience a single drive failure (knock on wood). Zero drive failures in ten years, how …
I've always been fond of the idea of the Raspberry Pi. An energy efficient, small, cheap but capable computer. An ideal home server. Until the Pi 4, the Pi was not that capable, and only with the relatively recent Pi 5 (fall 2023) do I feel the Pi is OK …
Before Chat-GPT caused a sensation, big tech companies like Facebook and Apple were betting their future growth on virtual reality. But I'm convinced that virtual reality will never be a mainstream thing. If you ever used VR you know why: A heavy thing on your head that messes up your …
Introduction Victron Multiplus-II inverter/charges are configured with the veconfigure 1 tool. Unforntunately this is a Windows-only tool, but there is still a way for Apple users to run this tool without any problems. Tip: if you've never worked with the Terminal app on MacOS, it might not be an …
Introduction The other day I was supporting a customer with an Elixir-based platform that would make use of Elixir libcluster , so messages on one host can be passed to other hosts. This can - for example - enable live updates for all users, even if they are not communicating with the same …
This is a brief article in which I compare the IKEA VINDSTYRKA $50 air quality monitor (PM2.5) with a $290 air quality monitor made by Dylos to see if it's any good. Context If you care about indoor air quality, you may already own a CO2 to determine if …
In my last blog post I discussed how a small solar project - to power this blog on a Raspberry Pi - escalated into a full-blown off-grid solar setup, large enough to power the computer I use at the moment to write this update 1 . In this update, I want to discuss …
In 2020 I wondered if I could run my blog on solar power , being inspired by Low-tech Magazine , doing the same thing (but better) 1 . The answer was 'yes', but only through spring and summer. I live in an apartment complex in The Netherlands and my balcony is facing west …
The price of Solid-state drives (SSDs) has dropped significantly over the last few years. It's now possible to buy a 1TB solid-state drive for less than €60. However, at such low price points, there is a catch. Although cheap SSDs do perform fine regarding reads, sustained write performance can be …
Preface In this article I provide instructions on how to setup a local Ubuntu mirror using debmirror . To set expectations: the mirror will work as intended and distribute packages and updates, but a do-release upgrade from one major version of Ubuntu to the next won't work. Introduction By default, Ubuntu …
Introduction Between 2003 and 2006, I ran a Dutch movie review site called moevie.nl . 1 I built the site and wrote the reviews. It never made any money. It cost me money to host, and it cost me a lot of time writing reviews, but I remember enjoying writing …
Introduction Back in 2004, I visited a now bankrupt Dutch computer store called MyCom 1 , located at the Kinkerstraat in Amsterdam. I was there to buy a Western Digital Raptor model WD740, with 74 GB of capacity, running at 10,000 RPM. When I bought this drive, we were still …
Introduction Disclaimer: this article is intended for consumers and hobbyists. If you want to run your own router at home, the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 1 can be an excelent hardware choice: it's fairly cheap it's fast enough it can saturate it's gigabit network port it is power-efficient The …
Introduction The goal of this article is to give you a practical understanding of Lead Acid batteries. We won't address the underlying chemistry, we'll treat them as a black-box and we will discover their characteristics and how to keep them healthy. Disclaimer I'm an amateur. I have absolutely zero relevant …
Introduction Update April 2023: It has been fairly quiet since the announcement of this feature. The Github PR about this feature is rather stale and people are wondering what the status is and what the plans are. Meanwhile, FreeBSD has announced In February 2023 that they suspect to integrate RAIDZ …
During a cleaning spree I decided that it was time to recycle two old laptops that were just collecting dust on a shelf for many years. Although I didn't have any purpose for them anymore, I realised that the displays were still perfectly fine. This is the display of my …
Introduction Ubuntu Server version 18.04 LTS uses the debian-installer (d-i) for the installation process. This includes support for 'preseeding' to create unattended (automated) installations of ubuntu. the debian installer With the introduction of Ubuntu Server 20.04 'Focal Fossa' LTS, back in April 2020, Canonical decided that the new …
Introduction Update September 2023: A small horizontal and large vertical row of pixels died. Demo of defective display here . I'm running a solar-powered blog and I wanted to add a low-power display to show the daily solar 'harvest' 1 and maybe some additional information. So I decided to use an …
Introduction I made an offhand remark about technical debt to a friend and he interrupted me, saying: "technical debt is just bullshit". In his experience, people talking about technical debt were mostly trying to: cover up bad code cover up unfinished work source 1 Calling these issues 'technical debt' seems …
Introduction This blog is now running on solar power. I've put a solar panel on my balcony, which is connected to a solar charge controller. This device charges an old worn-out car battery and provides power to a Raspberry Pi ~~3b+~~ 4B, which in turn powers this (static) website. For …
Introduction I sense this sentiment on the internet that RAID is dangerous, that the likelihood of your RAID array failing during a rebuild is almost a certainty, because hard drives have become so large. I think nothing is further from the truth and I would like to dispel this myth …
Introduction When it comes to dealing with storage in a DIY NAS context, two important topics come up: Unrecoverable read errors (UREs) or what old people like me call 'bad sectors' Silent data corruption (data corruption unnoticed by the storage layers) I get a strong impression that people tend to …
Introduction Lots of people run a NAS at home. Maybe it's a COTS device from one of the well-known vendors 1 , or it's a custom build solution (DIY 2 ) based on hardware you bought and assembled yourself. Buying or building a NAS is one thing, but operating it in a …
Introduction Fio is a widely-used tool for performing storage benchmarks. Fio offers a lot of options to create a storage benchmark that would best reflect your needs. Fio allows you to assess if your storage solution is up to its task and how much headroom it has. Fio outputs .json …
My home networking setup I live in a two story apartment, with on the top floor my utilities closet and my living room. The bottom floor contains a bedroom with all my servers and networking gear. So this is my setup (click for a bigger version): I like to run …
Introduction I'm aware that most people with intensive storage workloads won't run those workloads on hard drives anymore, that ship has sailed a long time ago. SSDs have taken their place (or 'the cloud'). For those few left who do use hard drives in Linux software RAID setups and run …
Want to listen to this article? Your browser does not support the audio element. Introduction How would you explain the inner workings of bitcoin to a person in simple, understandable terms? source This explanation seems perfect to me because it illustrates some seriously problematic aspects of cryptocurrencies in one simple …
Introduction The goal of this blogpost is to help you better understand storage performance. I want to discuss some fundamentals that are true regardless of your particular needs. This will help you better reason about storage and may provide a scaffolding for further learning. If you run your applications / workloads …
Introduction Update : I've noticed some strange behavior of SSDs when benchmarking them with FIO. After further investigation and additional testing, I've found the reason for the strange patterns in the graphs. The 'strange' test results are due to the fact that they were obtained by connecting the SSDs to a …
I've used fio - a storage benchmarking tool - to benchmark a 1.44 MB floppy drive to gauge its random I/O performance. I have no real reason for doing this. I just thought it was funny. I've run a benchmark against the floppy drives for different queue depths. The results …
New release of fio-plot I've rewritten fio-plot , a tool that turns FIO benchmark data into nice charts. It allows you to create four types of graphs which will be discussed below. The github project page explains how to run this tool. Fio-plot also includes a benchmark script that automates testing …
Update fall 2024 I have decided to decomission this machine and it is no longer in use. As of this moment, it's replaced by a cluster of four 1L PCs which use about a third of the idle power usage and boot within 20 seconds. The single-core performance of these …
Introduction To learn more about Ceph, I've build myself a Ceph Cluster based on actual hardware. In this blogpost I'll discus the cluster in more detail and I've also included ( fio ) benchmark results. This is my test Ceph cluster: The cluster consists of the following components: 3 x Raspberry Pi …
UPDATE 2019 / 2020 There are official ARM64 binaries of Ceph that you can run on a 64-bit version of Ubuntu 18.04 . Important: I consider this page obsolete. I will keep it up for transparency's sake Introduction In this blog post I'll show you how to compile Ceph Luminous for …
Introduction In this blog post I will try to explain why I believe Ceph is such an interesting storage solution. After you finished reading this blog post you should have a good high-level overview of Ceph. I've written this blog post purely because I'm a storage enthusiast and I find …
⚠️ 🚨 Update 2024 🚨⚠️ I'm not using OpenVPN anymore for my VPN needs and this article is considered unmaintained. It's stronly recommended not to use this tutorial and find up-to-date documentation. I also have no plans to update this blogpost in the future. [Update 2018] This article has been substantially updated since …
Introduction In the summer of 2017, HP released the Proliant Microserver Gen10 . This machine replaces the older Gen8 model. For hobbyists, the Microserver always has been an interesting device for a custom home NAS build or as a router. Let's find out if this is still the case. Price In …
InfiniBand networking is quite awesome. It's mainly used for two reasons: low latency high bandwidth As a home user , I'm mainly interested in setting up a high bandwidth link between two servers. I was using quad-port network cards with Linux Bonding , but this solution has some downsides: you can only …
One day, I lost two virtual machines on our DR environment after a storage vMotion. Further investigation uncovered that any storage vMotion of a virtual machine residing on our DR storage array would corrupt the virtual machine's disks. I could easily restore the affected virtual machines from backup and once …
RAID 5 gets a lot of flak these days. You either run RAID 1, RAID 10 or you use RAID 6, but if you run RAID 5 you're told that you are a crazy person. Using RAID 5 is portrayed as an unreasonable risk to the availability of your data …
When building your own DIY home NAS, it is important that you simulate and test drive failures before you put your important data on it. It makes sense to know what to do in case a drive needs to be replaced. I also recommend putting a substantial amount of data …
Introduction Update December 2023: In June, it was announced that iXsystems would sponsor implementing the VDEV expansion feature. A new pr has been created for this effort. The feature was merged into the code base, but may not be available to the general public before the end of 2024 . **Update …
I think the HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 is a very interesting little box if you want to build your own ZFS-based NAS. The benchmarks I've performed seem to confirm this. The Microserver Gen8 has nice features such as: iLO (KVM over IP with dedicated network interface) support for ECC memory …
I'd like to argue that both ZFS and BTRFS both are incomplete file systems with their own drawbacks and that it may still be a long way off before we have something truly great. Both ZFS and BTRFS are two heroic feats of engineering, created by people who are probably …
My goal is to export ZFS zvol volumes through iSCSI to other machines. The platform I'm using is Debian Wheezy. There are three iSCSI target solutions available for Linux: LIO IET SCST I've briefly played with LIO but the targetcli tool is interactive only. If you want to automate and …