coding-mayhem

 Let me start by telling a little bit of the back story. Recently I build a mini ITX desktop PC to help me with my more resource intensive programming work. I used a all in one liquid cooler in this PC. ( Kraken X63 ). Setting something like this in Windows is quite straight forward, not so much in Linux. In this article I will detail what I did to get it working the way I wanted.  First problem to solve was to find a driver/controller software for the cooler, that works in Linux. These coolers come with only windows driver/controller software with no official Linux support. Thanks to the awesome open source community there is a cross platform tool that I can use to talk to the API of the liquid cooler which is called liquidctl . To be more specific I had to use an experimental branch of this tool that supported the API version of my hardware.  Installation is quite straight forward. My preferred Linux distro is Arch . I used an already ported AUR repository of the mainl...

 In this series of posts I'm going to outline the process I used to create my own Nextcloud server.  Network Setup First step is to prepare my network. I'm planning to host this at home. Due to obvious security concerns I don't want to host this on my home network. I used pfSense  to achieve what I want. The pfSense setup is outside the scope of this post. If you do need help or is curious about setting up pfSense let me know. Given below is an overview diagram of my network,  The basic firewall rules in this network are Server can't talk to the switch.  Server can't talk to the pfSense router interface Server interface has Suricata IDS/IPS running.  Drive Preparation and Encryption Secure erase the drive.  Note: The drive I used was an old HDD. What I didn't notice was that the partition table was of type DOS. Had to change that to GPT and repeat this process in order for it to work. I'm going to use a 250GB HDD for my instalation (not a SSD). First...

 In this article I will detail the steps I followed to install Arch Linux in my XPS 13 9300. It came with windows 10 preinstalled.  My main references during the process was, installation_guide [Arch Wiki] Dell_XPS_13_(9300) [Arch Wiki] Prerequisites The first step is to change the SATA mode from "RAID" to "AHCI". Without doing this the linux installation can't identify the nvme drive on the laptop. This involves going through a few steps.  Boot into windows and run the following commands Open a command promt with admin rights bcdedit /set {current} safeboot minimal Restart into bios and change the SATA mode to AHCI Boot back to windows and open an admin command prompt bcdedit /deletevalue {current} safeboot When I run  bcdedit /enum it doesn't show "safeboot" any more.  Next I disabled fast startup on windows. I'm doing this as I may choose to mount windows partitions when I'm on linux, and fast startup setting is known to cause issues. I...

In this post I'm going to talk about why and how I moved my Open Media Vault Network Attached Storage system to my Ubuntu server. In my previous posts I talked about my OMV NAS. In my NAS I have the following things set up. SMB shares that can be accessed by both Windows and Linux machines Custom user permissions Automated backups Metrics and logging In an attempt to be more frugal I'm trying to reduce the number of servers in my home lab. So lets talk through the process of moving this setup from OMV to Ubuntu. What's involved,  Mounting multiple USB hard disks to the same location between reboots Creating samba shares in Ubuntu server Setting up SMB in windows client machines Automated backups using rsync and cron Metrics and logging Mounting USB drives permanently As mentioned before I'm using 3 USB hard drives for storage and backup. These USB drives needs to be mounted to the same location all the time because the SMB shares and the r...

This is a continuation of my previous post " Building a Server from scratch " My XPS 12 9q33This Too Shall Pass Lets recap. In my previous post I narrowed down the processor ( i3-9100 ), chipset ( B360 ) and the motherboard ( Asus B360M-A ) I would use if I'm going with an Intel system. This would cost me about $235. In this post I'll be looking at a comparable AMD system. The main areas I'll be covering in this post are, AMD processor discovery Compare the chosen AMD processor with the Intel one Chipset and Motherboard options for the chosen AMD processor Choosing the right memory for my server How to choose a power supply unit Hard drive selection Generally when comparing processors, the main parameters to look at are; Clock speed Number of cores Number of threads Locked / Unlocked ( in other words is it overclockable ) In this instance since, my requirement is to run a server on this hardware and the number of cores becomes the major...

My Dell Laptop MB from 2011 There was a time back in the day where everyone used PCs. Laptops were not as powerful and were rare and expensive. I would say I have build roughly about 20 PCs from scratch for friends and family during those good old times. Nowadays building a PC seems like something only gamers do.  I'm in the process of building a home server. I will talk about the whys in a future post. In the process I had to refresh my knowledge about building a PC. In this post I will outline the thought process I went through while building my Server from scratch. First step is to decide on the processor. Everything else evolves around the processor. For example, Motherboard chip-set  Memory speeds Memory types ( M.2, Ultra M.2 ) I/O capabilities ( SATA 6Gb/s, 3Gb/s ) On-board graphics Overclocking Budget First I checked Intel processors. I assumed that Intel is going to be more expensive compared to AMD so the idea is to find the best Intel Process...

(This is a continuation of my previous post ...) In the last post I talked about the RAID failure and needing to find a new solution. In this post I will talk about the solution I went with. If we are to look back at the failed attempt, the reason I decided to go with a RAID5 setup with my 3 disks is  Having a 2TB disk Between vindy and myself having 2TBs seem enough space Redundancy  The Raid5 disk can survive a 1 disk failure due to the way parity works. How do I achieve similar outcomes without the power of RAID. The answer is "Nightly Backups" First of all I nuked the RAID5 and partitioned the disks again. This time I created 3 NTFS partitions. Did I hear you ask why NTFS. If for some reason I get the disks out of the NAS I have the flexibility to plug them into any of the devices we use. As mentioned in my first NAS post I use an XPS 15 with Ubuntu and Vindi uses an XPS 12 with Windows. I mounted these so that OMV knows about them. This ...