Modernizing my homelab for Europes 2022 energy crisis
Posted on October 12, 2022
| 13 minutes
| 2635 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
Intro. It should come as no surprise that Europe is currently undergoing it’s worst energy crisis since the 1970s. While power has always been somewhat expensive here, at least when compared to our US friends, running a small homelab was possible without starving. The current electricity prices are fluctuating between €0.5 and €1.3 per kWh, meaning that power hungry computer equipment has suddely become really expensive to run.
As a small example, simply powering an 8 port UniFi US-8-60W requires around 16W excluding POE power draw.
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I moved my NAS to the cloud
and you could too
Posted on March 25, 2021
| 12 minutes
| 2519 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
This blog has been in a state of neglect for a long time. Not because I meant to, but as they say “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans“, and life has been happening a lot to me these past few years. To the point where I’ve had little time for personal projects, and when I finally made something, it either turned out to be a bad idea, or not in a state I wanted to show.
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Graphing Raspberry Pi performance with sar
Posted on August 24, 2017
(Last modified on September 11, 2017)
| 2 minutes
| 353 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
As part of monitoring the general health of my Raspberry Pi boxes, i like keeping a historical image of how the load was at a given time. I have real time monitoring in place, which will alert me via Pushover if something goes haywire1, and my surveillance does it’s own checking and alerts (via the same pushover container) if a sensor fails to report within a given period.
I based my graph generating script on the one described here, though the memory calculation in that script is not what i wanted, and this being a memory restricted platform, i also wanted to monitor swap in/out.
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Running a Docker Swarm on a Raspberry Pi Cluster.
Posted on August 10, 2017
(Last modified on August 29, 2017)
| 5 minutes
| 1026 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
For a long time i’ve wanted to experiment with running a small cluster on my Raspberry Pi’s, but I’ve always had lots of other things to do. Recently i started moving my hosted services from my NAS onto a single Raspberry Pi, and came across a few older Raspberry Pi’s, and thought now is a good a time as any, so here goes.
Hardware used I used the following components:
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Replacing my old server with a Raspberry Pi 2
Posted on March 6, 2015
(Last modified on April 15, 2015)
| 3 minutes
| 540 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
I’ve been running a server at home for as long as i can remember. Over the years, the tasks performed by the server has varied greatly, from a complete mail/web/file server, to file/streaming/backup, and in it’s most recent incarnation, streaming/backup.
Somewhere along the way (2008 or so), a Synology NAS snuck in, “hijacked” all our data, and streams to AirPlay and Chromecast devices.
For the past 8 years, my server has been a Mac Mini, replaced every 3-5 years with the latest model.
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Using Raspberry Pi as a UniFi controller
Posted on March 9, 2014
(Last modified on August 14, 2017)
| 3 minutes
| 610 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
Despite having had relatively high end network products, I’ve had numerous problems getting maximum performance from the network. Because of this, I’ve recently converted my home network from various consumer products to running mostly Ubiquity products, including EdgeMax Routers and UniFi AP.
Part of the UniFi product line is the UniFi Controller, which is an application that sits on your network, and actively monitors your access points. Running it is optional except for various enterprise functions, like guest network hotspot.
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Realtime login monitoring, Part 2
Posted on January 24, 2014
(Last modified on August 14, 2017)
| 3 minutes
| 636 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
My original script for monitoring had a few issues. While it worked really well for the actual push notifications, it didn’t seem to be able to survive log files being rotated.
I initially settled for a solution where I just scheduled a restart of my service every night after the logfiles rotated, but i hate loose ends, so I rewrote the script, this time using inotify instead of just calling “tail -F” in a subprocess.
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Realtime login monitoring with Pushover
Posted on September 9, 2013
(Last modified on August 14, 2017)
| 5 minutes
| 939 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
See Part 2.
My previous article was about securing your Raspberry Pi and having it alert you via email whenever something suspicious occurred. This time I’m taking it a step further, and adding real time push notifications whenever somebody logs in via ssh.
For delivering the notifications I’m using Pushover, which is a generic push service, with clients for both iOS and Android. The app isn’t free, but once you purchase it, the service is free up to 7500 messages per app, per month, which is more than enough for this purpose.
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Securing a collocated Raspberry Pi
Posted on July 15, 2013
(Last modified on September 11, 2017)
| 18 minutes
| 3704 words
| Jimmy Selgen Nielsen
There’s an updated version available of this guide here This is a small guide i wrote for setting up a new Raspberry Pi server hosted at PCExtreme I know there are plenty of guides on how to secure your server, but i wanted this as a recipe for myself.
I don’t normally use “cookbooks”, but since setting up a remote server isn’t as trivial as setting up a local server, i felt it was worth creating a list of things to do, afterall if things go wrong you can’t just pull the plug.
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