Today I’m trying to reduce the power consumption of my Proxmox Backup Server. The HP Microserver is great for what I need, but it’s kinda loud and I’m working on optimizing my power bill. The homelab is the largest single consumer of electricity aside from the air conditioning in the summer, so it’s something I’m looking at heavily. Anyway, I thought I could do this purely with systemd sleep / suspend initially.

Do you have security cameras at your house? Would you like to locally host all of your recording and analytics, to make sure nobody else has access to your video feeds and recordings? Would you also like to integrate with Home Assistant, the greatest open automation platform in the world? Then Frigate NVR is for you! In this video, I’m going to go in depth to setup Frigate in an LXC container, for maximum efficiency.

Is RISC-V the future of computing? I sure hope so. So I tracked down one of the cheapest Linux-capable SBCs that supports this architecture, the Milk-V Duo. For a retail price of $9, this little guy offers a RV64 Linux environment complete with busybox, Ethernet, and a wide assortment of IO rivaling some microcontrollers. Today I’m going to steup the board and start learning about RISC-V computing! Fundamentally, the RISC-V architecture is a document which describes the binary machine lanuage of a 32, 64, or 128 bit processor with integer and optional floating point support, but it’s also symbolic of the shift to open computing for the future, and as a computer engineer I’m excited to learn more about it.

So Linux has adopted Persistent Device Naming, which is a really great thing for most systems. Unlike the old days where we just had eth0 and eth1 and eth2 etc (which at least has no spaces unlike Local Area Connection 6 that another OS uses), whose order depended on driver initialization in the kernel. Most people just had eth0 and were happy, and most people will still just have one Ethernet interface and will still be happy.

A Discord member of mine came to me with an interesting problem - enbling the VLAN-aware bridge in Proxmox would cause all network traffic on the physical card to stop, entirely. Definitely a frustrating issue, especially since the kernel logs made no sense. The Problem Here’s what he sent from dmesg: [ 32.732509] mlx5_core 0000:19:00.1: mlx5e_vport_context_update_vlans:179:(pid 13470): netdev vlans list size (4080) > (512) max vport list size, some vlans will be dropped [ 32.

Occasionally, I find myself wanting to start something custom as a systemd service, so it starts at boot. There’s a whole wealth of information on how to properly write systemd services, but I just want the bare minimum to get my command executed on boot and running on its own. Hence, here is the most basic systemd service guide. Feel free to read the systemd docs (systemd.service, systemd.unit, systemd.exec) for more info on what can go in the service file if you want to get fancy.

After my scare with the Z-wave controller dying due to SD card failure (See the blog post), I decided that my Zigbee network is important enough to back up, especially because a whole lot more important data is stored on disk rather than in the dongle as with Z-wave. I’m going to follow the same path I took in the Z-wave blog, but for Zigbee2MQTT. Since it’s running ‘bare’ on a raspberry pi, I can’t just backup the whole virtual machine.

As mentioned in my last blog post, I setup an autofs share to mount my NAS for backups. Since I’ve always used fstab in the past to mount this, and it’s quite unreliable for cifs shares, and some internet articles go into way more detail than necessary on setting up autofs, here’s a very quick overview on setting up samba / CIFS shares with autofs on Raspberry Pi OS (or any other Debian / Ubuntu based system).

I got my Z-Wave Raspberry Pi setup a few weeks ago, and then spent a ton of time setting up my Bedroom Lights, Bathroom Fan+Light, and ordered even more Z-wave hardware. I also started up an RTL-433 server for a yet unfinished project, and about a week later, Home Assistant suddenly reported all of my Z-wave devices offline. Home Assistant was unable to connect to the WebSocket of ZWaveJS. The Pi was acting really weird.