My homelab rack — a 20 year history

My homelab rack — a 20 year history
My setup when living at home, 2004

I built a rack out of wood in 2004 — it was at home, and a lab, of sorts, so I guess that makes it a homelab 🙂

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at 20 years’ worth of homelabbing ❤️

Read more →

Chasing MikroTik CHR bottleneck

Chasing MikroTik CHR bottleneck

While doing some WireGuard testing between local peers; I noticed weird performance issues on my virtual MikroTik router. This lead me down a rabbit hole of testing the layer 3 throughput on my virtual CHR.

The bit rate started at close to 10 Gbit/s, but then dropped to 3-4 — only in one direction 🤷 Time to investigate…

Read more →

Upcoming homelab projects

Upcoming homelab projects

My homelab rack has been running as is for a while now — it’s time for a few new projects.

I’m rearranging stuff to better utilize the space, looking into 25 Gbit networking, and putting a HP Z440 server to good use 🙂

Read more →

Measuring outdoor temperature with a Raspberry Pi and DS18B20 probe

Measuring outdoor temperature with a Raspberry Pi and DS18B20 probe

We have a Dakboard digital calendar in our kitchen — showing lots of house and temperature data. So naturally; it must show the actual outdoor temperature as well.

To do this I used a Raspberry Pi 2, and a DS18B20 HAT I made some years back.

Read more →

(Re)set the time on our Komfovent ventilation system

(Re)set the time on our Komfovent ventilation system

Our Komfovent balanced ventilation system is pretty bad at accurate timekeeping — the time drifts several minutes over the course of a few months. This is a bit annoying as the operator panel is prominently located on the second floor, and we use it to tell time.

Luckily; the time can be set using the Modbus interface.

Read more →

Upgrading the Proxmox VE server hosting my router

Upgrading the Proxmox VE server hosting my router

I recently upgraded all my Proxmox VE servers from version 7 to 8 — which was a straight forward and easy process. But one server presented a challenge; the hypervisor running my router. How to apt dist-upgrade with the router down?

It turned out to be very easy, here is how 👇

Read more →

Enabling touchpad tapping in X11 on my Linux laptop

Enabling touchpad tapping in X11 on my Linux laptop

I’ve been using my HP ZBook 15 G5 laptop a lot lately, but it annoyed me that I couldn’t tap the touchpad in i3. It does have physical buttons — but I’m used to tapping on the pad… My laptop is running Arch Linux BTW 😉

Luckily it was really easy to fix 🙂

Read more →

Improving dark mode and syntax highlighting

Improving dark mode and syntax highlighting

In May last year; I did some changes to the dark mode theme and syntax highlighting on this blog. Resulting in higher contrast, improved syntax highlighting in light mode, and a few others things.

It took me a while to get around to document this, but here we go 👇

Read more →

New tools over the Christmas holidays

New tools over the Christmas holidays

Over the Christmas holidays, organizing some tools, I realized my screwdriver collection was in pretty poor shape. I can’t even remember the last time I purchased a new screwdriver…

I actually think most of them were in a tool-box that my wife had — when we first met. I’ve bought plenty of tools over the years, but new screwdrivers, apparently.

So; I ordered some Wera screwdriver sets, and a few other things 👇

Read more →

Arch Linux laptop power — suspend, battery, and charging

Arch Linux laptop power — suspend, battery, and charging

I recently got a new laptop, (well — not new, but new to me), a HP ZBook 15 G5. After installing Arch Linux and the i3 wm I spend some time setting up power management, suspend on idle, and figuring out the state of the battery.

Read more →