Making a pub table — with an old oak tabletop

Making a pub table — with an old oak tabletop

Sometimes, when I’m not too busy with my homelab or some other electronics project — I pretend to be a woodworker or carpenter.

This time I made a pub table, using an old kitchen tabletop of oak. I got it for free from a good friend, he had stored it in his barn for a number of years, and before that it was a desk.

It wasn’t in great condition, with lots of scratches and dents — even some black spray paint. But it was oak, and it was free 🙂

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Optimizing WireGuard on MikroTik CHR

Optimizing WireGuard on MikroTik CHR

I’ve been having a strange problem with outgoing WireGuard traffic, the problem has probably always been there — I just haven’t noticed, until now. Outgoing WireGuard traffic is very slow, while incoming is what I’d except with my 750/750 fiber internet connection.

This lead me down a rabbit hole of testing performance internally, which I documented in a previous blog post. That turned out to be a queue issue on the SFP+ port on my MikroTik CHR router. Could this also be queue related?

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Underground conduits to garage and shed

Underground conduits to garage and shed

Two years ago we dug and laid three conduits from the house to the garage, and from the garage to the shed. Primarily to get more power to the garage — and any power to the shed.

I used the opportunity to put in an additional conduit for fiber, and lots of conduits from the main switch board down into the basement.

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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 ❤️

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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…

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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 🙂

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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.

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(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.

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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 👇

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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 🙂

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