• 6 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I think I’m a step behind you. I use Uptime Kuma for monitoring and it worked really well. Just have it running on a pi separate from my main machine.

    I worked out how to get it sending me emails when things are down and up, and now my email inbox is a fucking hot mess of notifications.

    So I’ve just this weekend integrated it into Home Assistant and set it to notify me when things are down for 5 minutes or more.

    My next step was going to be finding some way of integrating Portainer into Home Assistant so I can restart stopped containers, and maybe Proxmox so I can reboot VMs from HA. Not sure it’s possible yet though.

    Ultimately I want to have HA send me a notification with actionable buttons with “reboot container” and “reboot VM” which, when pressed, will sort the issue out.

    However this will not help when one of my drives goes down. They’re HDDs plugged in by USB3 which isn’t great and my server is behind the coat rack so sometimes the kids just throw their coats on and it falls onto my server, which then heats up and goes silly.





  • I’ll be honest and say that most of my self hosted music collection was pirated or ripped from CD like 20 years ago. I put it all on an iPod back then.

    I found the iPod gathering dust in a drawer when I finally got a car with a usb jack a couple years ago (yeah I’m not exactly laden with bags of cash over here) and recently pulled all that music back onto my newly set up media server.

    I have a Spotify family account I’m trying to phase out with resistance from the children.

    To support artists I go and see them when they tour and buy a ludicrously expensive t-shirt


  • Back when I was a streamer I used Kodi with the add-ons (I was in a subreddit where the current good ones got posted now and then) and had a Real Debrid account.

    It was really convenient, maybe give it a go with your Pi. There’s an OS you can bang on it (is it openelec? Libre-elec? Something like that) and just plug it into your TV. You’ll have to work out controlling it in a convenient way, I have a little keyboard about the size of a remote with a usb dongle. It’s got a little touchpad for the mouse and cost me fuck all on Amazon.

    You do have to pay for Real Debrid but it’s totally worth the price and will get you used to paying for piracy.

    So the cycle goes:

    Install Kodi and play with the free streams and think it’s pretty great, get frustrated because you can’t watch that one thing, finally bite the bullet and get a month of Real Debrid, tell your friends how ace Real Debrid is.

    Just skip that and get Real Debrid once you have your Pi set up.







  • As a shop floor guy I identify with what you’re saying and if you’re not in one get in a Union.

    But those guys do all the paperwork and business shit. If they don’t do it right then it can blow holes in the business, which pays your wages.

    For example, this week has been a shit show at work because the IT crisis happened. This has meant parts that we need haven’t arrived, and lines have shut down.

    Management have had their heads up their arse trying to keep shit running, sending folk home on holidays, hell lads are taking time off unpaid rather than bum around doing “preventative maintenance”

    Someone has gotta make sure all that shit works out and it ain’t me. I’ve just got to get the parts out when they’re there.

    All I’m saying is that in a good company there’s less “Us and Them” everyone has a role that’s recognised, and individuals are judged on their work rather than their position. You can have good and bad CEOs and Forklift Drivers



  • Me too, except it’s Adguard for me.

    Came in handy yesterday actually. I have a friend who works for a University which was recycling some Chromebooks.

    He managed to grab 3 for me, one for myself and one for my kids.

    Problem is that one of my kids is being supervised through Google Family Link which means for some reason the Play Store won’t work.

    So he is now unsupervised in Family Link just to get the Chromebook working.

    So I’ve just given both my kids static IPs and pointed their Chromebooks at Adguard, then turned on Safe Search and adult content blocking.

    Now I’m fairly confident they’re protected from a lot of the bad shit on the internet.




  • I have also got a dell optiplex and Proxmox and a Debian machine with mostly Arr in containers.

    I also have 3 old HDDs that I’m using for it, of various sizes (2x1tb and 3/4tb)

    I have used a powered usb3 to sata connector to hook them up to the Dell. As in I have 3 usb to sata connectors, and each one also has a plug socket. I’ve got those 3 plus my Dell in a 4 gang extension lead so it’s only using 1 plug socket in my kitchen. They were about £15 each on Amazon.

    I have had a gotcha from using usb that destroyed my setup.

    I now have a working solution that will stop this happening again:

    So I have 3 usb-sata HDDs hooked in via the usb ports. I set up Open Media Vault as a VM. Then I passed through the USB drives to the OMV VM.

    Those drives are then shared via SMB (I’ve just added NFS) to everything that needs it via the OMV VM.

    I can then access the HDDs via this SMB share in Proxmox for backups if that’s what you wanna do.

    Now the reason I’ve done it this way is because originally I had the drives in Proxmox. I gave them names and then put those names in the Fstab of Proxmox. One of the drives “forgot” it’s name and Proxmox wouldn’t then boot because one of its drives wasn’t accessible.

    You could get around this by adding an option to the end of your fstab, I think the option is “nofail” but I’m not 100% so just check up on it.

    I’ve used this option in my Debian VM Fstab to mount the NAS drives so my Arr stack can see them, and even got my Squeezebox server using them too. I’m using CIFS so I can see the drives on my Windows PC so I can manage the storage on my desktop.

    So there you go, usb HDDs with passed through usb sockets to OMV VM is how I do it. If one of the drives fails OMV still runs and I just find I have no media in Plex and have to figure out why my drive isn’t working anymore.


  • I’ve had a usb to sata running to a 2.5" sdd that acts as the main storage and boot for my pi4b, and it’s been in use for 4 years with zero issues so far.

    I’ve now got 3HDDs attached to my Proxmox machine for NAS storage via usb ATM. It’s been running since Feb. It’s had it’s issues but those were more my fault for not understanding the flake factor (since my experience with the sdd) I had one drive forget what I named it, so my whole Proxmox died.

    But that was remedied by passing the USB straight through to OMV.

    Just saying, I’ve not really had the same experience as you with them, they seem fine if you have an idea what may fuck up.