Bought a desk organizer a few weeks ago to arrange all my micro systems. The NUC, RPi NCP, Odroid and routers all now sit neatly in one space. The sliding shelves are an added bonus and the open back and sides give a lot of space for air circulation and cable management.
Over the last couple weeks, a colleague and I have been trying to clean up the cable mismanagement behind our racks. To work on the equipment you’re literally standing on about 1 feet of coiled cable mess. This issue has probably been there over the last several years and nobody has paid much attention to it. Likely because it does not affect the actual functioning of the equipment? And also, this is painstakingly unrewarding work. ...
Of late, the NUC has been getting really hot. Core CPU temperatures were hitting the 80s despite the system being on literally no load. When I first bought it in mid-2020, I was aware that this lineage of tiny monsters were known for their ‘hot’ness and the fan being a bit loud. Only over the last few months have I really seen this sudden spike in temperatures though. ...
A bi-yearly rundown on the state of the home-servers I run and applications I host on the cloud. Published while listening to: Mist of Capricorn ( Manavyalakincharadate ) | Agam A few major changes since the last September update: During the Jan trip, I moved the Odroid XU4 and NCP over to MD. Thanks to WireGuard, I can still access these remotely super seamlessly! Brought in the RPi4 NC to the same WireGuard network. Lesser maintenance! Not quite using the Navidrome and Calibre-web setup as much. Definitely nice to have though. Setup a couple Matrix Bridges. Ansible is pretty awesome! Need to front the Snikket instance I setup in Jan when I have the mind-space. I think I’m liking Caddy better than Traefik! Next few months, I’ll probably focus a bit more on SSH hardening, implement more robust Firewalls and automating the backups. ...
After a good one year away from Whatsapp, I’m back on it . This time however, on better terms. All thanks to the Mautrix bridge and the Matrix protocol. Essentially, I can access my whatsapp account data on my regular phone or desktop using Elements’ pretty robust app system. Note that the whatsapp app however is either running on a Virtual Machine or in my case an old phone fronted with a VPN. Since whatsapp only needs the primary phone to connect with their servers once every two weeks, it’s pretty much just sitting there turned off while all the group and individual messages show up on the bridged element app. ...
Over the last few months, I was able to take some time to explore a few self-hostable options. I got to explore caddy (Which is terrific by the way!), setup guacamole and I’m also absolutely loving Navidrome. I got rid of OSMC since we weren’t quite using it as much and setup pi-hole to block ads network wide. With these changes, I think I am able to put these devices to real good use. While at it, I also setup a WireGuard tunnel from a VPS to access my local devices securely outside my home network. ...
Leave a comment if any of this doesn’t make sense. I’ll be more than happy to help. I recently installed Navidrome on an Odroid XU4 and configured Guacamole on my NUC. To access these applications securely on an external network, I setup a WireGuard tunnel and took this opportunity to learn how to use Caddy as a reverse proxy. Here’s a quick walk-through: Setup the VPS: Since we need a VPS just to tunnel traffic, get a lightweight one from a reliable provider. After the regular server hardening, setup your first WireGuard peer. I chose to use this script . ...
I have been using Anydesk for a while now to remote into my NUC workstation. It works great but for one big downside - It needs you to install the tool on both machines. While looking for alternatives, I came across Guacamole which is a clientless remote desktop gateway. Set it up on the server and you can access your desktops now from any browser! So technically, If needed I could access my workstation even from a hand held device. All I need is a browser that supports HTML5! ...
A quick rundown on the state of the home-servers I run or applications I host on the cloud. Published while listening to: Malang With our temporary relocation, I currently manage two ‘home-labs’ - one which I remotely manage with a WireGuard tunnel and the other just a local-access only setup. The remote home-lab is essentially a Nextcloud server running on a DietPi OS spun on an RPi4. I pulled down the HAProxy config on the fronting server since that was no longer required. ...
Earlier last week one of my external hard-disks went kaput. Though it’s fair to assume the recent travel could have led to this, my guess is that it was just a case of an ill-fated drive. While I did lose all the data on that drive, I thankfully had duplicate copies of the over 200GB data on other drives or machines. This is the first time that I’m losing a hard-drive and I’m so glad I was prudent enough to have multiple copies. All thanks to the folks over at Backblaze who frequently publish hard-drive failure statistics on their stock! ...