Category: Hardware

  • Making a Logitech MX Master 3 Thumbwheel Work Under Linux

    I have a Logitech MX Master 3 mouse which I absolutely love, it’s easily the best mouse I’ve owned (and I’ve owned a few) but as with many things Logitech it isn’t super well supported out of the box under Linux (Debian 12 in my case). For whatever reason Logitech pretty much acts like Linux…

  • Installing Pi-Hole on Proxmox

    In this article I’ll be installing Pi-Hole on Proxmox. Pi-Hole is a DNS sinkhole or blackhole that can effectively block ads and other unwanted content. It works by replacing your usual DNS server with Pi-Hole and then dishing up non-routable addresses for unwanted content based on a block list. In this article we’ll be installing…

  • Setting up SMART Monitoring in Proxmox

    The aim of this article is to configure SMART monitoring in Proxmox and to send emails in the case anything untoward is found. You should already have the email system set up as per this earlier article. This article assumes that you have disks attached directly to the system rather than via a RAID controller.…

  • Disk Performance Testing in Linux

    Testing the performance of a disk under Windows is easy, you download and install CrystalDiskMark and hit “All”. Of course it can get more complicated than that but if what you want is a quick and fairly accurate measurement it’s got you covered. Under Linux things aren’t quite as simple. Please don’t think I’m saying…

  • Checking Hard Drives from the Linux Command Line

    When buying new hard drives it’s always a good idea to check them for bad blocks. If a drive had bad blocks it can be an indication it’s not long for this world, especially if the number of bad blocks grows over a short period of time. In this article I’ll show you how to…

  • Notes on Configuring a Home Server

    I’ve run a home server of one kind or another for as long as I can remember, at least 25 years at this point. My old server was starting to show it’s age so I decided that it was time to build a new machine and learn a new technology or two along the way.…

  • Using Your MikroTik Router with Sky / Now TV Broadband

    I recently switch to Sky / Now TV broadband from Plusnet. I’d been with Plusnet for many years and while they started out as a fairly decent company with some well priced offerings as they have grown they have become worse and worse. The customer service has slipped and the prices have risen. My contract…

  • Flash Memory Plugin for OpenMediaVault

    If you are installing OpenMediaVault on a Raspberry Pi chances are you are running the operating system off an SD card. SD cards are great for read only access by they will quickly wear out and die if they get a lot of writes. OMV causes a lot of write operations when generating the graphics…

  • Adding an Storage Drive and SMB Share to OpenMediaVault on Raspberry Pi

    In an earlier article we installed OMV and did the most basic set up. In this article we’ll add a storage drive. This article assumes you have a Raspberry Pi 4 with OMV 6 installed and working correctly. We’ll be attaching a USB hard drive which has an NTFS partition on it. Attaching a Drive…

  • Installing OpenMediaVault (OMV) on a Raspberry Pi

    OpenMediaVault (OMV) is an open source Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution. It ships as a distribution but you can also install just the packages if you have a suitable base system (Debian essentially) which is what we’ll be doing here. OMV has a web based interface that can be used to configure almost all aspects…

  • Permanently Mount a Drive on Raspberry Pi

    Working on your Raspberry Pi from the inserted SD card is fine for some applications but if you want to store a significant amount of data or perform more intensive IO operations then you’re going to need to attach an external hard drive. Connecting a drive over USB3 should mean you get a decent throughput…

  • Running Docker on a Raspberry Pi

    Docker has, for a lot of cases, become the go to way to install and run certain services. Docker is a container system which means it comes with all the advantages of containers such as ease of installation, resource management and security. Docker is also fairly low overhead so it’s possible to run a number…