Tag: 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…

  • Mounting USB Drives Under Debian

    I’m currently designing a backup system built around Resitc and removable USB drives. Before I can really get started though I need to properly understand how to manage the drives, in particular mounting and unmounting them. What I’m hoping I’ll be able to achieve is a situation where I can mount a drive somewhere (let’s…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Adding and Testing a New HDD Under Linux Mint

    I recently treated myself to a new hard drive as I was running out of space. I decided to go with a Seagate external drive and shuck it for my server. Shucking is the act of removing a drive from an eternal drive enclosure and fitting it somewhere else such as a NAS. I’ve not…

  • AMD 3900X Based PC Build

    I’ve not built my own PC in a vary long time so I thought it would be prudent to do a little research. When I last built a machine manuals were sparse now they are down right non-existent it seems. The notes below cover the bits that I found to be not entirely obvious.

  • Installing Linux on a PowerEdge 860

    I’ve got a couple of old Dell PowerEdge 860 servers. They are nothing to write home about but they are functional and good enough for playing around with (I’m investigating KVM and Xen virtualization at the moment). What I need to do though is install from a USB as I don’t have any CD’s to…

  • Monitoring an LSI MegaRAID on ESXi 5

    I’ve been installing a new ESXi 5 based VMWare server recently. The machine contains an LSI MegaRAID 9260-4i RAID card and four decent sized disks. The host operating system installed fine and I thought everything was going well until I got almost to the point of completion when I went to check that error reporting…

  • Fixing the MikroTik Router After an Upgrade

    I recently upgraded from RouterOS V5.13 to V5.16. The interface is a bit nice to look at (especially in the web configuration tool) and there is now a quick setup window in WinBox. The only downside of the upgrade is that all of a sudden my Internet connection stopped working.