sbs20

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  1. HP Microserver Gen8 - Firmware and BIOS NAS HP Microserver Gen8

    I have an HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 which I use as my main NAS. One of the really neat things about it is that it has Integrated Lights Out. This is HP's version of Out of band management. Dell has DRAC, Cisco has IMC. It's also known as IPMI. Anyway, mine was old and needed updating. What's out......

  2. DIY Devices - The VPN DIY devices Wireguard VPN

    There are times where it's really useful to be on my home network when I'm away. In the past I have achieved this with SSH port forwarding. It works well enough for most things - but it's a bit of a faff changing web proxies and of course it doesn't work easily for everything. I thought it would be......

  3. DIY Devices - Virtualisation DIY devices Virtualisation

    I started a new job in 2016 where I was now using enterprise network servers more - and on a more Unixy stack than my previous Microsoft one. I frequently needed to run virtual servers for development. It was possible to do on my work laptop but that only had 8gb RAM. I was also tinkering with other......

  4. DIY Devices - Media Centre DIY devices Raspberry Pi Kodi tvheadend

    In 2005 I bought a Windows Media Centre - it ran a fanless Pentium mobile processor and worked reliably for about 10 years. But the NIC failed. There was no HDMI port. Windows XP was getting long in the tooth and it wouldn't run Windows 7. So in 2015 I bought a new one; a fanless i5 (4690s) desktop......

  5. Kodi 19 library failures kodi The TVDb

    Kodi 19 Matrix seemingly fails on library scans which worked perfectly in 18. I experienced this recently - my library remained unchanged from before but the scans were only about 85% effective. Of course, from time to time, programs will change for some reason (either they're corrected or the......

  6. DIY Devices - network attached storage DIY devices NAS ODroid HC2 RAID

    How I went from off the shelf RAID devices to single drive Debian. My first NAS was a QNAP TS-201. I can't remember exactly when I bought it but I think it was around 2007. It had two 1TB disks in RAID1. That was a lot of space back then - at least for me. But having lots of storage soon meant that......

  7. DIY Devices - the network DIY devices Home router Raspberry Pi

    TL;DR - go to the appendix Why? # I had been interested in buying a raspberry pi back in 2015 and conincidentally had been having internet connectivity issues. I had found that my internet connection was actually fine, but the DNS servers that my router was serving up (my ISP's) were flaky. I'd read......

  8. DIY Devices - introduction DIY devices Home router Raspberry Pi

    I run various media centres, two PVRs, a music server, two NAS devices and various virtualised servers including HomeAssistant and Unifi. I am a software developer in my day job and have a professional interest in having good equipment but I also like to tinker with things and know what’s going on.......

  9. Eleventy blog static site generation

    I've been meaning to write some blog posts for EVER. The blocker had been what to write it in. The problem is that I quite liked Medium for a while, but then it got slow and annoying and I was always worried about losing my posts. As with all things "free" and "cloud", one is......

  10. In promotion of plain text Productivity Plain text

    I’ve been writing and using software for a long time now. I have documents dating back to the late 80s written on my dad’s Amstrad PCW 9512. I have things I wrote on the ZX Spectrum dating back to 1984. I have recordings of me that my dad made in 1979. Apps come and go; data formats come and go;......

  11. Beating Ransomware Hygiene

    I recently had to help someone out with some ransomware. It’s a pretty miserable experience to find someone has lost all their data. The story ended fairly well though; all the most important data was in Dropbox. The really short version is that even though the data was corrupted, it was possible to......

  12. Back it up Hygiene

    Backing up your data is dull. It just is. It’s insurance. And that’s dull too. It takes time. It’s not exciting, fun or life enhancing. Until, that is, you’ve experienced the stomach churning moment where you look catastrophic data loss in the eyes. When was the last time you backed up? Was it on......

  13. Shut it down Hygiene

    Computers are complicated. There is a lot of stuff on them. There are regular updates to apps, operating systems, drivers and data. And every time something breaks (which it will do) it will be because of a change somewhere. And there is no better (worse) time to break than when booting up. Reboot......

  14. Secure Yourself Hygiene

    You use two factor authentication (2FA) right? Sometimes it’s called two-step verification or dual factor authentication. The idea is that as well as a password you need a temporary code to log in to your account. In short, even if someone guesses or steals your password, they won’t have your code......

  15. Understanding Notes and its Developers. lotus-notes development

    This was originally written in May 2002 back when Lotus Notes was slightly more relevant than it is today. I’ve reproduced it here in its original form for posterity and because it got a bit of attention back then. How many times have you heard it said that Notes is no good... that it’s a useless......