hardware - ktz.

How I Made My 10-Year-Old Nvidia Shield Feel Brand New

Cleaning up the Nvidia Shield: the exact ADB commands from the video, how to verify them, and how to roll everything back.

technical

A Cheap No-Frills OPNsense box

If you're looking to build a small, quiet and cheap box to run OPNsense on then I have a build you might be interested in. This box has been happily running as my firewall since July 2019. I originally documented the build in this forum post over at serverbuilds.net but for posterity I wanted to record this information here too. Here's the build: Item Model Price in 2019 Approx 2023 price Notes Motherboard Intel DQ77KB $37 $50-60 Dual on-board Gigabit ethernet CPU Intel i3 3225 $29 $6

technical

A USB Fan Controller that now works under Linux

Relying on the built-in motherboard headers on server grade motherboards to reliably control fans with Linux has been a crapshoot since forever. I'm pleased to report that last summer the Corsair Commander Pro received native Linux kernel driver support in the 5.9 release.

technical

Scrutiny - A SMART Hard Drive Monitoring tool

Scrutiny is a (currently) closed source SMART hard drive monitoring tool with a pretty web interface and integration with Backblazes' excellent quarterly stats.

hardware

Awesomo Server - Build Log Entry #2

Things were getting a bit toasty in there. The watercooled Xeon E5 2690 v2 CPUs themselves were fine sitting at around 40c but the PCH (kind of like the Southbridge) and RAM were hitting 70c+ constantly.

linux

New server build log

That means I need a lot of threads and a lot of memory and a lot of storage.

technical

New Hard Drive Rituals

That new hard drive. Should you trust it? Maybe. Edit: This article was originally published on https://blog.linuxserver.io. Over the last 10 years that I've been messing around with Linux servers (hence the name of the site by the way there's been one thing above all else that's always required special care - hard drives. They are mechanical beasts just waiting to eat your data at any time. Entire businesses are built around their inherent (un)reliability. Backblaze make a point every quarter

opinion

pfSense APU 1D 4GB early review

After many years of telling myself I didn't need one finally this week, I purchased a dedicated pfSense box. The unit is the LinITX APU 1D 4GB from linitx.com. I opted for the 4GB RAM model with a 30GB mSATA SSD which should make storing configurations and data for services such as Squid a doddle. This system is a beautiful little black box that gives no hint of what lies beneath, stealth computing at its finest. The packaging was basic, but got the job done. I had to pay an extra £6.44 f