Networking at home

 In 2021 I have already installed Linux on my Beelink Mini MX and published an article about it here . Now I wanted to use it and turned out that WiFi and Bluetooth is not working 😢. So I have started again and figured out, how to make it work.  Here you have the results of my experiences with CoreELEC , LibreELEC and Armbian . It was not easy, it took me approximately 2 month to get the best possible out of this little and now outdated hardware.

 I needed to refresh my aged Zabbix installation and I wanted to use a docker based solution, to keep it isolated from other components in the network. There are some caveats that need some time to resolve.

Beelink MiniMX is an Adnroid TV box, back from 2016, containing S905 system chip, 1 Giga RAM, 8 Giga eMMC, HDMI output, 2 USB 2.0 ports and a Gigabit ethernet. The original Android system which was shipped with the device, was very buggy, but even today you can upgrade the operating system to Linux. In this blog, we will show how you can install Ubuntu based Armbian linux on it, and how to make use of it as a desktop computer.

I have an older Synology NAS at home, and I am planning to replace it with a custom built NAS. To decide which system to put on it, I have setup 5 different NAS solution in a virtual environment and measured how fast they are. There were two prerequisites to the candidates: they should support WSD and SMB Multichannel.

After installing the Tasmota Firmware on my smart socket , it is time to process the measurement results by some application. At home I am using Zabbix, wich has goot graphing possibilities, can be used to set up triggers for specific events, and has a documented API, to retrieve historic data. In this post I will show how to add the energy monitoring measurements to Zabbix.

I have a lot of computers running at home, all connected to the same plug trough a distributor and I wanted to measure the amount of electricity they consume. I could use a $250 manageable PDU for this purpose, but I found it better to buy a $10  Tuya compatible 16A Smart Plug  and flash it with the  Tasmota  Firmware. In this article I describe, how to do it.

Multigigabit is a technology for wired LAN connections where the speed exceeds 1 Gbps. In the recent times a lot of new equipment was announced, supporting this technology, this article tries to summarize what is available today and on what price.

In this post we will measure the performance on the PPPoE multilink over 2 gigabit connection.

In this post we will measure the performance of balance-rr bonding over 2 gigabit ethernet connections.

I had a dream, to connect two computers on my Home network with two gigabit ethernet connections and have a 2 gigabit connection to use. However even after a lot of experimenting I could not get real benefits in the everyday use. The closest I could get was the PPPoE multilink setup. In this series of post I will share same of the test results for a normal one gigabit network, a bonded 2 gigabit network and a PPPoE multilink 2 gigabit network.

VirtualBox has a built in solution for automatically starting and stopping vitual machines, as it is well explained in this post . However, I have a lot of virtual machines, and depending on what I am doing a different set of machines are running. I am not in a critical environment, therefore my vm host is set to automatically install updates, and if needed restart. In order not to loose the virtual machines I have written a small systemd service, which on shutdown saves all running virtual machine states and on restart starts them again.

An a server it has no advantage the GRUB and the Linux kernel is booting up in graphical mode, as it is only hiding the potential error messages. The following is a simple receit to switch it off.

We all know that to have the array device names persist you have to do:  mdadm --detail --scan >>/etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf However this is not enough, this has to be also updated in initram, so the easiest way to do it, is by running: dpkg-reconfigure mdadm This will automatically update the initram. (I do not mention here, that after piping the array list to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, it is very practical to manually check if everything is correct, to avoid duplicate arrays or old not-any-more existing arrays.)

Using iSCSI is very usefull even in home environments. In Linux on the server side you can use TGT for this purpose, usually you can manage it weasily with Webmin , but I did not found the correct way to add a file name with spaces to the /etc/tgt/targets.conf. So finally I maked a symlink to the file and added the link to the config file and it workied. ln -s /media/disk/file\ with\ spaces\ in\ name.img /home/user/iscsitarget And put the /home/user/iscsitarget in yout TGT config file.

I have experienced very poor performance on the RAID set up on my new computer, so I decided to do a short test of the speed and capacity of different RAID configurations.

Sometimes you may need to move your contacts from Outlook to your Google account. Most sites recomend doing an Outlook export to csv and then import it to Google Contacts, but that doesn't transfer your pictures, and if you are not using English language, you have to play arround with the field names. Here is an easy way to transfer your contacts with all details.

Deduplication means, that when saving data to disks, if the same data is stored once more, then only a reference is stored and space is saved. OpenDedup is an open source online (real-time) deduplication solution, with one of the goals to provide a solution for storing Virtual Machine images, where big parts of the images could be duplicated. In this article we test OpenDedup, both from speed and compression point of view.

This is a test performed on an Ubuntu 1604 virtual machine, to verify, how you can expand a SW RAID, which is used trough an LVM by a file system, without losing data.

I have just scanned approximately 2000 slides from my parents and I decided to tag them, to make it easier to search among them. The goal is to store the tags inside the jpg files, and to be standardized, not dependent on any specific software. The first idea is to use the standard EXIF fields for this purpose.

I have been using my Lenovo P70A for almost one year until now, but recently I get more and more feedback from my partners, that they do not hear what I am saying, when we are talking over the phone. This is some kind of audio problem of the phone, so I thought that this can be fixed by upgrading the firmware of the phone,  so I started to experiment with custom firmware. In this blog I explain all the details of upgrading firmware, making backup of your actual firmware and data, and about the tools related to the firmware upgrading.