Louwrentius

Disclaimer: no AI was used to write this article.

All major AI services like ChatGPT or Claude are heavily subsidised by investors.

Context I'm running a virtualisation lab environment, with four Intel-based CPUs (i5-6500) and one AMD Ryzen 3 PRO 2200GE.

The problem Some time ago I worked with a customer that used Ansible to deploy a multitude of applications across their individual TAP1 environments.

Skip to the bottom two paragraph for instructions on how to replace the battery.

My 4U 71 TiB ZFS NAS built with twenty-four 4 TB drives is over 10 years old and still going strong.

I've always been fond of the idea of the Raspberry Pi.

Before Chat-GPT caused a sensation, big tech companies like Facebook and Apple were betting their future growth on virtual reality.

Introduction Victron Multiplus-II inverter/charges are configured with the veconfigure1 tool.

Introduction The other day I was supporting a customer with an Elixir-based platform that would make use of Elixir libcluster, so messages on one host can be passed to other hosts.

This is a brief article in which I compare the IKEA VINDSTYRKA $50 air quality monitor (PM2.5) with a $290 air quality monitor made by Dylos to see if it's any good.

In my last blog post I discussed how a small solar project - to power this blog on a Raspberry Pi - escalated into a full-blown off-grid solar setup, large enough to power the computer I use at the moment to write this update1.

In 2020 I wondered if I could run my blog on solar power, being inspired by Low-tech Magazine, doing the same thing (but better)1.

The price of Solid-state drives (SSDs) has dropped significantly over the last few years.

Preface In this article I provide instructions on how to setup a local Ubuntu mirror using debmirror.

Introduction Between 2003 and 2006, I ran a Dutch movie review site called moevie.nl.1 I built the site and wrote the reviews.

Introduction Back in 2004, I visited a now bankrupt Dutch computer store called MyCom1, located at the Kinkerstraat in Amsterdam.

Introduction Disclaimer: this article is intended for consumers and hobbyists.

Introduction The goal of this article is to give you a practical understanding of Lead Acid batteries.

Introduction Update April 2023: It has been fairly quiet since the announcement of this feature.

During a cleaning spree I decided that it was time to recycle two old laptops that were just collecting dust on a shelf for many years.

Introduction Ubuntu Server version 18.04 LTS uses the debian-installer (d-i) for the installation process.

Introduction Update September 2023: A small horizontal and large vertical row of pixels died.

Introduction I made an offhand remark about technical debt to a friend and he interrupted me, saying: "technical debt is just bullshit".

Introduction This blog is now running on solar power.

Introduction I sense this sentiment on the internet that RAID is dangerous, that the likelihood of your RAID array failing during a rebuild is almost a certainty, because hard drives have become so large.

Introduction When it comes to dealing with storage in a DIY NAS context, two important topics come up: Unrecoverable read errors (UREs) or what old people like me call 'bad sectors' Silent data corruption (data corruption unnoticed by the storage layers) I

Introduction Lots of people run a NAS at home.

Introduction Fio is a widely-used tool for performing storage benchmarks.

My home networking setup I live in a two story apartment, with on the top floor my utilities closet and my living room.

Introduction I'm aware that most people with intensive storage workloads won't run those workloads on hard drives anymore, that ship has sailed a long time ago.

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Introduction The goal of this blogpost is to help you better understand storage performance.

Introduction Update: I've noticed some strange behavior of SSDs when benchmarking them with FIO.

I've used fio - a storage benchmarking tool - to benchmark a 1.44 MB floppy drive to gauge its random I/O performance.

New release of fio-plot I've rewritten fio-plot, a tool that turns FIO benchmark data into nice charts.

Update fall 2024 I have decided to decomission this machine and it is no longer in use.

Introduction To learn more about Ceph, I've build myself a Ceph Cluster based on actual hardware.

UPDATE 2019 / 2020 There are official ARM64 binaries of Ceph that you can run on a 64-bit version of Ubuntu 18.04.

Introduction In this blog post I will try to explain why I believe Ceph is such an interesting storage solution.

⚠️ 🚨 Update 2024 🚨⚠️ I'm not using OpenVPN anymore for my VPN needs and this article is considered unmaintained.

Introduction In the summer of 2017, HP released the Proliant Microserver Gen10.

InfiniBand networking is quite awesome.

One day, I lost two virtual machines on our DR environment after a storage vMotion.

RAID 5 gets a lot of flak these days.

When building your own DIY home NAS, it is important that you simulate and test drive failures before you put your important data on it.

Introduction Update December 2023: In June, it was announced that iXsystems would sponsor implementing the VDEV expansion feature.

I think the HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 is a very interesting little box if you want to build your own ZFS-based NAS.

I'd like to argue that both ZFS and BTRFS both are incomplete file systems with their own drawbacks and that it may still be a long way off before we have something truly great.

My goal is to export ZFS zvol volumes through iSCSI to other machines.