So, you want to send HDMI video around your house? Maybe you want to use your office computer on your living room TV without a proprietary streaming solution like AirPlay or Chromecast? Share a cable or satellite box between your living room and bedroom? Or you’re crazy like me and you want to put all of your computers into the basement, and connect to any of them from any desk in the house?

Short tutorial this week, how to import a VM image you may get to use in Proxmox. I took a vacation for Thanksgiving, so back to the regularly scheduled madness soon. Enjoy! The Basics: You need to use qm importvm (See the man page here if you want to reference it). The basic command is: qm importvm <vmid> <source> <storage> <options> Where <vmid> is the number of a VM which alraedy exists, <source> is the path to a file which qemu can convert (qcow2, vmdk,raw img), and <storage> is the name of a storage location in Proxmox.

I’m sure many of you follow me because you use Proxmox. It’s been a staple of my content for some time now. So, while working on the next episode of the Ceph series, I thought it would be good to do a separate segment on networking. So, here you have it. The basics of VLANs, Bridges, and Bonds in Proxmox VE. I’m only covering the native Linux versions, not Open VSwitch and VXLAN.

I have a thin client addiction. You all have seen my 3x Dell Wyse 5060 Hyperconverged Cluster project. And you know that I bought a Dell Wyse 3040. But, I actually bought 3x 3040s, and someone sent me a Wyse 7010, and an HP T620 (yet to be reviewed). And now I bought another. An HP T530. I’d consider this to be an excellent choice for anyone wanting to run Home Assistant, since it has enough power for, an upgradeable M.

As some of you may know, I have a Raspberry Pi which handles all of the radios for Home Assistant. It runs ZwaveJS2MQTT (using the WebSockets connection to Home Assistant, not MQTT), Zigbee2MQTT (using MQTT), and RTL-433 (also using MQTT). So, it’s fairly critical infrastructure. Usually, with critical infrastructure, I try to get it PoE powered so I don’t have to worry about power bricks and can get battery backup via the CRS328 network switch in the basement (which is on a battery of its own).

Proxmox has a pretty good backup scheduler, but it relies on the backup destination being mounted as a storage location. This implies that the backup destination needs to be a protocol that Proxmox supports - SMB (CIFS), NFS, … or Proxmox Backup Server. If you want to push your backups to a cloud service, you probably need something a bit more complicated. Thankfully, Proxmox’s backup scheduler thought about this and has a hook feature we can use for this purpose, and we can use any protocol supported on the Debian base system, including things such as FUSE or s3cmd.

I previously wrote about my install of RTL-433 on a Raspberry Pi, running Raspberry Pi OS Buster. With the release of Bullseye, rtl-433 is now merged into the repository and doesn’t need to be compiled from source. So, I thought it would be a good time to revisit this project and make a video about it, this time using a cheap eBay thin client instead of a raspberry pi, and showcasing my setup a bit.

In this part of the 3018 Desktop Router project, I setup a permanent home for CNCjs on a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client. I’m running CNCjs as the CNC control software and G-code sender (the CNC’s grbl controller is actually doing the motion control). I’m using mjpg-streamer to add a USB webcam to the CNCjs web UI, with nearly no load on the CPU to encode. And I’ve setup a script to launch ffmpeg to record the mjpeg stream when g-code is started and stopped (also using nearly no load on the CPU to transcode).

Today, I open a new gift to the homelab - an HP MicroServer Gen8. This little chonky cube is full of hard drives and not a whole lot else, making it a perfect test system for ZFS, TrueNAS, Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server, etc. and I’m already planning the videos I want to make with it. So come along as I open it up and see roughly what’s inside, the specs, and use HP iLO (their proprietary IPMI) for the first time.

My dad bought a Sainsmart Genmitsu 3018 PROver CNC router over a year ago, but never really set it up or learned how to use it. Since I enjoy the role of creating and maintaining tools and infrastructure, I decided to help him set it up and operate it to cut thin polycarbonate sheets. In this first episode, I hook the machine up to my laptop and try to cut out a representative model from 1.