Nearly a year since I’ve posted

Having my annual itch to start blogging again and I noticed that it’s almost a year since the last time I posted. Good grief. What’s been going on in tech land this year? I continued to move everything for the home systems and Chia to wall mounts. That’s now complete, with the exception of the […]

Setting up k3s on a single RPi4

Testing out the ability to run some containers on RPi4 and I have a single borrowed device. Most of the tutorials out there describe a multi-node configuration and that’s led to some challenges for me to understand this. First, I started with this tutorial: https://github.com/mhausenblas/kube-rpi This gets you there most of the way, but I […]

Free Veeam linux backups

I didn’t feel like fighting against Nutanix CE any more so I copied my VMs out using qemu and rebuilt the entire cluster with ESXi 6.7 free. Seems to be ok so far with a few minor issues. Now that I’m back in operation I have a concern about having a single copy of my […]

Nutanix CE, Dell H700 and disk detection

Not sure why I didn’t post this before, but here it is. When installing Nutanix CE on a Dell server (R710 in my case) with a PERC H700 card you can’t do a pass-through on the disks. You have to configure them as a single disk RAID0 in the PERC config.  Ctrl-R at boot for […]

Ok, not bailing on Nutanix CE just yet

Since my last post I’ve been fighting to get the cluster back to some semblance of stability.  Doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.  However, there isn’t anything out there that approaches the ease of configuration, fault tolerance and hyperconverged storage I’m looking for.  So…I’m making sure I have a backup copy of my VMs […]

Bailing on Nutanix CE

I’ve had a number of problems with CE lately that look like they’ll be difficult to fix.  Not sure I’ll have a better experience with a different platform, but I figure it’s about time to try.  If nothing else, I’ll have some backup copies of my VMs, which is not an obvious thing in CE. […]

Grafana and Chromecasting to a TV

I’ve wanted to use simple Chromecast dongles for pumping a Grafana dashboard to a TV for a while now.  The challenge has been how to effectively manage the casting source.  Chromecasts can’t manage any of their own content, they can only be a casting target.  I don’t want a mobile device sitting in the rack […]

My Grafana dashboard

With all of this tutorial publishing I’ve been doing for Grafana, I have neglected to post what mine currently looks like.  So, here it is.  This is the 1080P version.  I also built an iPad version that has a lot of the same info but compressed for the smaller screen.

Unraid shell script for getting stats into Grafana

Continuing the documentation effort.  This is a shell script you run from Unraid in a cron job to feed stats to InfluxDB.  You can then present them in Grafana.  Note about that, I was having a lot of trouble getting the Grafana graphs to present correctly for anything coming from this script.  I had to […]