Welcome to the technical ramblings that go on in my brain. I will post information about my homelab, projects I undergo and tutorials as I find similar blogs on the internet very inspiring and informational; I can only hope that the same comes across here.
Charging your Mighty Using USB-PD
Intro.
POV – You want to get baked but your Storz & Bickel device is dead. You do not know where your charger is or you’ve just found out it’s broken.
This is not a good situation.
Thankfully, I’m here to show you how to make yourself a replacement charger using USB-C PD. The following project is super simple and uses parts readily available from Ali Express/eBay, all you need is a few parts and some very basic soldering skills.
Okay, so, this has been sitting in my drafts for what feels like years and now the updated devices have come out with USBC onboard which is great, but I hope this will still be useful to lots of people out there!
Upgrading a Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switch
Intro.
This post will be a simple guide on how to upgrade your Cisco Nexus 9000 switch to a software version of your choice.
Unlimited Plex Storage via Google Drive And Rclone
What’s this now? This post is going to walk through how to create a Plex server with a Google drive backend for ‘unlimited’ storage. There are a few caveats explained below, reoccurring costs and a variety of ways to achieve this, but this will be the Muffin way. I go into a lot of detail … Read moreUnlimited Plex Storage via Google Drive And Rclone
Building (another) NAS.
Building Another NAS.
A lot has changed in my life over the last 6 months or so, moving out of my flat and quitting my job to travel the world only to have 2020 suck all meaning out of every fibre of my being making me yearn for the eventuality of Earth being obliterated into inexistence, but until that time my storage as of late left much to be desired.
I have been reminded, daily, by my Macbook that my last backup was almost 1 year ago and on top of this the storage I use at home is nearing it’s capacity as well as being degraded. I’ve been overlooking these things for quite some time but I have finally decided to remedy the situation.
Join me on my newest endeavour to build a new NAS, or don’t of course.
Building a Custom Ambilight System For Any Input With A Raspberry Pi and Hyperion
Another one of these? Really?
Yes. I love my Ambilight setup on my TV, and when I was originally doing this had some trouble oweing to different information here and there, so decided to do my own blog post on the matter.
What is this project? It’s an Ambilight system that runs from a Raspberry Pi that works on any HDMI input. This was very important to me, I did not want to use the Raspberry Pi as a media player, I love my Apple TV for that and I wanted other sources to work.
So, if you want something like the below, then continue reading….
Read moreBuilding a Custom Ambilight System For Any Input With A Raspberry Pi and Hyperion
Getting Started with VMWare Distributed Switching
Introduction; This post will be a brief intro into VMWare’s distributed switch technology and how to get your feet wet in the setup. This will not cover the advanced features or in-depth configuration but a followup may come in the future. I was myself rather confused at the concept at first and failed to see … Read moreGetting Started with VMWare Distributed Switching
Making A Raspberry Pi Grafana Monitor
Intro; For a while now I’ve wanted a compact, ‘at a glance’ look at some of my lab statistics and other things in my flat, since my lab is elsewhere. Originally I started looking for 4k monitors that could be rotated vertically, then I started looking for small hobby boards that could output in 4k … Read moreMaking A Raspberry Pi Grafana Monitor
Building a compact, quiet, low powered ESXi/Storage Whitebox Hybrid
Intro. So it’s that time of year again when my girlfriend and I decided we wanted to move, after a few months of searching we found a very cosy (and a not so cosy rent price to go with it) flat in Zone 1/2, London. Without boring you with a life story, the aim of … Read moreBuilding a compact, quiet, low powered ESXi/Storage Whitebox Hybrid
Muffin’s Colo Upgrade
Intro; So a lot of you read and enjoyed my colocation post a while back and since then things have been going well. I’ve used the colo’d host pretty heavily and it’s been serving me great for what I needed it for, my public facing applications have never been happier. I have since deployed cool things like … Read moreMuffin’s Colo Upgrade
pfSense: A Guide to NAT, Firewall Rules and some Networking 101
How to pfSense. So, you’ve decided to ditch that POS ISP provided router, or just literally anything marketed towards consumers and have installed pfSense, so.. what now? The following will be a guide on how to create, manage and understand both firewall rules and NAT in pfSense. I get asked a lot of questions daily and I … Read morepfSense: A Guide to NAT, Firewall Rules and some Networking 101
Muffin’s New Storage
Intro, A look back into the past. So a while ago, I posted this rundown of my Plex server and storage setup for media, and it got some traction, which is nice. In that post I mentioned that my storage setup left a lot to be desired and I had issues with it, let me … Read moreMuffin’s New Storage
Fixing ESXi 6.5 On HPE G7 Servers
HP, you motherfuckers. So there I was, moving VMs off of my main host (DL380 G7, 2x x5690’s, 192GB RDIMM), getting ready to replace the 8x 300GB RAID10 array I’ve been using for a while now with some 1TB disks and SSDs, awesome, right? So the host was powered down, ready for an upgrade, and … Read moreFixing ESXi 6.5 On HPE G7 Servers
Muffin Goes Colo
It’s colo time baby! So for a while now I have been toying with the idea of putting my own hardware up in ‘the cloud’ but due to the enormous prices for a homelabber I decided against it many times but now, however, I found a deal that was too good to pass up (considering … Read moreMuffin Goes Colo
HomeLab Update August 2016
Here we are again! 1 whole year after my initial Homelab rundown and I’m back with another one. I’ve made a lot of changes in the past year, some significant, some not so much and some of the main ones still a WIP. I was originally supposed to have a rundown in March but life got … Read moreHomeLab Update August 2016
Getting Started with VMware’s ESXi
Virtualization is awesome. It’s been the standard for enterprises for many years and although containers are gaining interest, virtual machines remain the go-to for any business; you’d be either crazy or incompetent not to go down this route in most scenarios. This post will go through the very basics of setting up and using ESXi.
Building a Rackmount Storage Server
Surprisingly, I don’t have any backups of my stuff. Apart from my Microserver Gen8 FreeNAS replication project which was necessary for my photos and personal media I don’t have any backups of my VM hosts, laptops or machines I use everyday which is very, very bad. A lot of my stuff is stored on RAID or RAID-like … Read moreBuilding a Rackmount Storage Server
Muffin’s Plex Server
I’ve gotten a few requests from various places to show my Plex server to the world, this is not by any means as good as it gets but it is mine and it works phenomenally. I’ve had a lot of concurrent streams with this thing and it’s yet to break a sweat.
Enable Disk SpinDown on LSI 9211/IBM M1015
I have a lot of 9211-8i’s in the lab, probably about 12, all flashed to IT mode. These are a godsend as they just work. They’re easy to flash to IT mode (rids them of any RAID, they become HBAs) and are 6GBp/s which is awesome. One of the things I didn’t know until quite later on is … Read moreEnable Disk SpinDown on LSI 9211/IBM M1015
HomeLab Update August 2015
Welcome to Muffin’s first Homelab rundown! I’ll explain what’s going on along the way, just sit back and scroll. Before getting too much into it I’ll just leave this diagram here, it may help understand things a bit better:
Understanding and Configuring VLANs
So I started off my IT career as an intern for a rather large company in London. I was doing a lot of misc stuff, mostly desktop but always pushed for as many networking bits I could, networking is great. A year later and here I am as a junior network engineer on the path … Read moreUnderstanding and Configuring VLANs
Create an IPSEC Site to Site tunnel between two PfSense firewalls
So I need to create an IPSEC point to point link between two sites so my two FreeNAS boxes can replicate between each other as per this project. I already run my network on PfSense and have done for a few years now and think it’s great so slapping a PfSense box at my mother’s house … Read moreCreate an IPSEC Site to Site tunnel between two PfSense firewalls
HP MicroServer Gen8 storage & Syncronisation across the internet
This plan didn’t work as intended. I had to come back to the drawing board and rethink/simplify some stuff. I have left everything as-is up to the point of failure incase it’s important to anyone and it really makes no sense to delete it. Below is what I wanted to do and a few of … Read moreHP MicroServer Gen8 storage & Syncronisation across the internet
Revisiting MicroServer Gen8 storage & Syncronisation across the internet
If you’re reading this revision first it’s probably better to read my initial plan as well before continuing as there are more details outlined there as to my overall goal and information about the hardware setup. You can read this here. Right, so, at this point I was to make a post about how I setup … Read moreRevisiting MicroServer Gen8 storage & Syncronisation across the internet
HP MicroServer Gen8 Setup & Upgrade
After a long ordeal with Britan’s worst courier service (Yodel, for those of you unaware) I finally received most of my parts which is good enough to make a start, so here it all is;
Installing FreeNAS on a HP MicroServer Gen8
FreeNAS will install just fine on the MS without any modifications and everything seems to work just fine, so i’ll skim over the install and add some detail to the configuration I used. As of writing this the current stable version of FreeNAS is 9.3. All that needs to be done is to download the … Read moreInstalling FreeNAS on a HP MicroServer Gen8
Turning a BT HomeHub 5 into a Gigabit Switch
BT is an alright ISP, I get good speeds (150D/40U), never get throttled and have yet to hear anything about my internet activity which involves a fair amount of P2P.. their hardware however is god awful, and the BT HomeHub 5 is no exception to that. I won’t go into how bad it is because if you’re reading … Read moreTurning a BT HomeHub 5 into a Gigabit Switch