Alex Kretzschmar

Reading a SMART report from a Seagate drive with smartctl can be bit tricky sometimes. Values that should be human readable are obfuscated. This can lead to issues in all sorts of tools, but what we really want is just a simple number. Thankfully, we can decode the output using the following command: smartctl /dev/sdX -a -v 1,raw48:54 -v 7,raw48:54 -v 241,raw48:54 -v 242,raw48:54 The command takes the input of -v ID#,raw48:54 so if you wanted to read Raw_Read_Error_Rate as a human, you'd ente

After a solid 8 months of testing, I think we have a big enough sample size to draw some conclusions. The best media server CPU is...

Full credit goes to this forum post. I found myself in need of dropping to the CLI for a fresh Home Assistant OS install on top of Proxmox after using the tteck helper scripts to set a static IP. To do this without access to the Home Assistant UI we must drop to the command line of HAOS itself. Simply typing login will drop you out of the HAOS CLI and you will be able to use nmcli to set these parameters on the underlying OS. nmcli nmcli is a command line tool to modify network configuratio

As is annual tradition, here are my 2023 highlights. It's been a big year! A new job, lots of time at Virginia International Raceway (VIR), Ella started at a new school, a trip to Canada, a roadtrip for Wookies in the Woods, and a whole lot of video work. Here's the full list in somewhat chronological order: * Built an AV rack for Drum recording gear * Gibson Custom Shop Silverburst Guitar acquired * Rebuilt Miter Saw station (so many drawers) * Caitlin and Dave visit Raleigh * Canes Hock

Inspired by @DerHase I wanted to get a journal thread going. This is my 6th Golf and my 4th MK7! This post is reconstitution of a thread on golfmk7.com - thread link. Over the years I've owned a 1999 MK4 1.6 Petrol (in the UK), a 2011 TDi 2.0 dieselgate, a 2015 MK7 GTi from new (in the UK). Then I sold that, emigrated to the US and bought a 2016 GTi which was stage2 APR tuned (Carmax sold it that way!) and got a shock as to how much VW USA limit features vs Euro models. I finally achieved nirv

3 months ago I'd never even done a brake job. I just finished replacing my intercooler on the R and so far everything seems so good! It wasn't hard per-say, just a little tedious. The whole job took me, a total novice, around 7 hours total. And the only thing I broke was a $3 hose clamp (more on that later!). This post was originally written over at golfmk7.com - thread link. The intercooler I went with was the Integrated Engineering V2 unit due to shipping times for the DO88. Performance wise

Today, we're going to take a deep dive into the world of DNS. Specifically looking at Tailscale's magicDNS feature which allows us to do neat things like refer to our Tailnet devices by name or configure splitDNS to query remote DNS servers.

This week I launched a YouTube channel. After many years of saying I would and not, I finally have. So here goes nothing! I'll be covering topics ranging such as self-hosting, home automation, Linux, cloud infrastructure automation tooling like Ansible and Terraform and much more... Here's my first video.

Whilst building out some new Grafana dashboards over the weekend I made the switch from InfluxDB to Promtheus node exporters for scraping metrics from Linux servers. But how do you marry up the drivetemp-scsi-0-10 value output from sensors to a physical disk?

I expected writing a custom filter was going to be difficult and cumbersome but it was very simple and in the end, much faster than trying to turn YAML into a programming language!

A wedding. Lots of travel. And lots of friends.

These desert vistas absolutely boggle my little mind. Most people come to Las Vegas for the brash, expensive and over the top spectacle. Indeed, it is fun for a night or two. But given the choice between a night in Vegas or another night on those dunes, there's simply no contest.