Ram's Technology Notes
In the previous post, we covered an opinionated and simplified overview of IPv6 and some practical considerations/annoyances for deploying IPv6 in a home network. Specifically, I wanted to address these annoyances when deploying IPv6 in my network: Note that the rest of the details in this post are written for a Unifi gateway. Network Setup…
IPv6 was supposed to take over the world a couple of decades ago but progress has been slow. Recently there was a celebration of more than 50% traffic to Google going over IPv6. While IPv4 is still dominant in most home networks, understanding IPv6 is a good exercise for someone running their home lab as…
In the previous post we setup inbound and outbound SMS routing through a LAN Asterisk server using a voip.ms SIP trunk. In this post we will make use of this functionality to allow a Home Assistant instance in the LAN to send notifications via SMS. The nice thing about this setup is that critical notifications…
In this post, we will cover configuring a local Asterisk server to route Inbound and Outbound SMS using a voip.ms trunk. This will also cover routing inbound messages to all known clients at the time the message is received so having multiple clients (like Jami, Linphone) registered to your Asterisk server for the inbound extension…
One of my long-standing projects has been to have Asterisk running on my home network so my services have PSTN (and potentially SMS) access. In this post, I will cover the setup of Asterisk as a home lan pbx with voip.ms setup as the SIP trunk. VOIP Providers While there are many VOIP providers, I…
This is the next installment in my running series on OpenClaw setup. One of the important ways in which OpenClaw setup can be a more useful personal assistant is by having more personalized and persistent memory about you, the things you care about and being able to retrieve them well based on context. The memory…
If you use ubiquiti network gateways as your router like I do, you will run into an annoying issue – Unifi does not properly configure dnsmasq so that it acts as the authoritative source for resolving names for your lan domain. The typical symptom is a long delay before names resolve when you attempt ping/ssh…
I had posted earlier about enabling hardware acceleration for Plex in a Proxmox container. After a bunch of updates of both the proxmox host and the container + Plex, at some point the hardware acceleration stopped working. The issue I saw was the host would log a bunch of errors related to the i915 GPU…
One of the first things you need to do after setting up OpenClaw is configure Model Providers. There are several options but these are the most common ones (and the ones that I have personally used): Comparison Of Model Providers OpenAI Codex Anthropic API Key Gemini API Key Ollama Providers
This post will cover setting up OpenClaw in a Home or Home Lab Linux environment. This is a continuation in the series of setting up OpenClaw as a personal assistant. There are different ways in which you can deploy OpenClaw for this use case: Of these, the second one is ruled out if you want…
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard the term OpenClaw somewhere — in the news, from a friend, from an acquaintance. I kept hearing about it too, and about three weeks ago I finally got curious enough to start playing around with it. This is my introduction to OpenClaw and my particular…
As I am exploring OpenClaw to setup a personal assistant for myself, I wanted to host some LLM capability locally. My hardware is a 3060 GPU with 12 GB VRAM. While this cannot host a good model to be the main backing AI for OpenClaw, it can still host several very capable models that can…
Sometimes you need to understand what a CLI is doing or figure out what the request/response looks like, or why something isn’t working and you suspect an interaction that’s outside your control with a third-party server happening through the CLI. While this is not strictly just for CLIs, here’s the quick setup for mitmproxy for…
A long time ago, I wrote a guide for sending automated mail from Ubuntu – those were simpler times where you only needed password based auth via smtp to send mail. Well, times have changed – SMTP password based auth will get deprecated at some point even for hosted Exchange. OAuth is better than simple…
Fixes After Ubuntu 26.04 Upgrade After upgrading to Ubuntu 26.04 (Plasma 6.6.4), two bugs broke the tool: Microphone Gain Tuning The C930e has two independent gain stages that are easy to confuse: Recently I started experiencing pain at the dip joint of my ring finger. That prompted me to look into how I can use…
In my setup, I have tolerance for a single drive failing. Because of this, I have a cold spare drive in case of drive failures. Hard drives generally have very good Mean Time Between Failures – however, there’s the problem of infant mortality or drives that just fail very early in their life. For a…
This is a continuation of the previous post where we tackled using the Kasa app with the controller (app) and devices in different VLANs. Here, we tackle Sonos, specifically Sonos S1 where the controller (app) and speakers are on different VLANs and the default firewall rule prevents communication from untrusted VLAN (where the Sonos speakers…
At long last, I started taking network security a bit more seriously at home and started restricting access to the Internet to some of my dubious IoT devices. To improve the security of the home network, the first step was creating VLAN setups – I now have one trusted VLAN and one untrusted VLAN. All…
If you use voip.ms and want to use their softphone on iOS with SIP over TLS, these are the settings that worked for me: After this, you should see your softphone registration show up as TLS on voip.ms portal and when you make/receive calls you should see the lock icon in the softphone indicating secure…
I use Plex for managing and watching media that I own. Recently I got the boxed set of Game Of Thrones Blu-ray and wanted to put them in Plex so I could watch them on devices of my choice. Ripping them is easy enough – just use makemkv. But there were some problems in getting…
Finally got some time to put all the pieces together for collecting logs from across my Home Network and centralizing them for analysis, visualization. The general setup is the following: In my case, I chose the following setup: Here’s a visual diagram of the system with various components and how they connect to each other….
If you use Unifi, it has a nifty zero-config VPN that allows you to both access and route traffic via your home network called Teleport. One issue I was running into though was that for some reason, my teleport client (iOS device in this case) didn’t get any DNS resolution ability. My setup is I…
I had setup rsyslog and alloy + loki to consolidate logs from all my servers in my home network for analysis, graphing and alerting. My goal was to: After some struggle, I was able to set this up with a combination of Dynafile and RSYSLOG_SyslogProtocol23Format in the loki forward format. It mostly worked – the…
So I didn’t actually face this problem for almost a year even though the change had happened before then and the reason was my container for Sonos SMB library share wasn’t rebooted in that entire time and only did when a long enough power outage recently forced shutdown of my container host as the UPS…
This is an update to my post on running Home Assistant in a Proxmox Debian LXC – the default instructions will allow you to run a 2024.10 version of Home Assistant. To run the latest version, you need later versions of Python. There’s awesome work done to backport newer python versions to Debian LTS releases…
I have started wasting time setting up Home Assistant. I have a lot of TP-Link Kasa devices at home. Home Assistant picked them up automatically and everything worked. As it happened, I bought a TP-Link Kasa smart power strip a couple of weeks ago. After setting it up with the Kasa app, I saw Home…
I haven’t set anything up in HomeAssistant yet, but I have it running and the portal is working (plus it is showing some devices, so it seems to be mostly functional). Here are the steps I took for installing HomeAssistant on Debian 12.0 LXC in Proxmox: That was pretty much all that was needed to…
Trying to centralize logs from services that do not log to syslog is an interesting journey. In this post we will cover some basics of rsyslog and how to setup forwarding of pihole logs to a rsyslog server. Note that this covers pihole logs as of pihole 6.x. If you are using pihole 5.x these…
Finally got around to hooking up my rsyslog server that consolidates all logs across the LAN with Alloy + Loki + Grafana. The alloy configuration was stupidly annoying – it looks like the code base is moving forward while leaving the documentation a bit behind. The task was fairly simply – try to get basic…
Now that I have a mushrooming number of services running on my home network, thanks to Proxmox and the ease of spinning up containers, it’s becoming harder to track how to reach them all. For example, pihole admin console runs on port 8080 but also requires path to be /admin. Similarly, grafana portal runs on…
Update: Fixing the file name fixes both the taskbar icon and task switcher icon. After a recent bout of updates on my Kubuntu desktop, I noticed that msedge web apps always show the Wayland Icon for the running window. This is pretty annoying – turns out the problem is a mismatch of StartupWMClass in the…
In iOS files app, you can connect to a SMB server over LAN and use it for storage (read and write). After an upgrade to iOS 18, it looks like Apple changed something where default settings for my samba server on Linux no longer allowed write access to the share from iOS – the share…
I spent more time on this script because it turned out to be a fun exercise – here are a few things that I added: Up to this point, I could prompt AI coding assistant (Gemini) to do things – note that I had to prompt them very specifically and do this incrementally. It seemed…
I have been using Handbrake UI for re-encoding video (and audio) for my home media for Plex – the general workflow is makemkv -> handbrake. However, this becomes a little tedious with 4K HDR content that takes a while to re-encode. Additionally, I was not happy with the audio gain options in Handbrake as I…
This is kind of an esoteric niche thing – but if you face this issue, I think this is a nice tool to have. My scenario is the following: I have several servers on my home LAN and I mostly work on them from my main desktop. Currently, my workflow is SSH into them and…
Warning: This is not something you should do in environments that care about security a lot – the default settings that do not allow this behavior is more secure and you should stick with that in such cases. In my home network, one annoyance is executing a command as root using sudo (my setup is…
Decided to teach myself some new tricks (moving to zsh from bash and neovim from vim) as a hobby. My main reason to stick with the basic bash and vim is that this is what is available by default and you can rely on by default in most environments, including those that you are unfamiliar…
The easiest way to shrink the size of a Proxmox container’s root volume is to backup the container and restore it to a new container with the updated volume size. The following sequence of operations will do this – please be careful and make sure to take full backups as some of these steps will…
Update: voipo.com went out of business roughly a month after I posted this. Apparently, they did this wholesale to a lot of customers. Are you thinking of getting VOIP service? If so, I have an extremely strong disrecommendation for voipo.com. Do not do business with them no matter what you hear from them or elsewhere…
Now that I am separating my services into containers or even VMs, I have enough servers running that setting them all up for something new (like centralized log collection through syslog or updating their postfix configuration to point to a central mail relay) is becoming tedious to do manually or with ad-hoc scripts. Enter Ansible…
One slightly tricky thing with proxmox (at least to me), is getting things right with bind mounts and id mapping from host to container. This is a brief overview of the basics and how to set this up so it works correctly: Background is that a proxmox container UID and GID space starts from 100000…
I am using a Windows VM for my gaming fix while having Linux as the host OS for my desktop. For gaming, I got a 8bitdo controller that can connect through both bluetooth and USB with a provided USB dongle. This is nice because I can use the bluetooth connection with Linux for native Linux…
As I split my network services into containers in a proxmox environment, an important service is being able to send email out to the Internet to my real email address from my home network devices and servers for automated alerts and regular actions that I care about. In the past, I just setup postfix with…
You may want to expose a Linux machine/server in your home to multiple VLANs to provide each VLAN with different services or allow access to that VLAN from the machine without having to go through the router. Here are ways in which you can do that on a machine with a single physical interface.
VLANs can be quite confusing but are a powerful concept to help improve isolation, security and creating network topologies that are not limited by physical constraints. VLAN stands for Virtual LAN and as the term implies, we create virtual LANs or broadcast domains. If there is one important thing to keep remembering as you explore…
As I am working through setting up my OpenWRT router, one of the things I am interested in is better monitoring and visualizations of monitored data from the router itself. This post is about some of the options for doing this: In general, the problem can be broken down into different pieces: Further, we also…
Some useful commands for Proxmox container management: Mount the filesystem of a container that is not running (if you mess something up where booting the container will create problems in your network for example – not that I would have any experience with this 😉 )
Started playing around with OpenWRT in a VM on my proxmox instance with the goal of converting that eventually to be my main router. However, before that I wanted to make sure that I both understand how to configure and work with OpenWRT as well as test my potential setup without disrupting production usage in…
Finally got around to fixing hardware acceleration on the plex container running in my proxmox server. These instructions work for Proxmox 8 and plex running in an unprivileged lxc container on debian (distribution should not matter, but I’m using Debian in the container). To make hardware acceleration work, we need to accomplish two things: For…
A couple of great utilities to split and join MP3 files from the command-line in Linux that are quite handy when you want to split a recording into tracks. mp3splt – a great stand-alone utility that can split an MP3 file into multiple tracks. Some of the things you can do: sox – a great…
If you are recording audio output from an application, one challenge is that recording the default output can mean you record all the sounds that are produced by all applications. In Linux, you can use pipewire command-line utility pw-link to create a dedicated and isolated link between the application producing the audio output and the…
Amazon Music does not have a desktop client for Linux. The web application works fine but is restricted to SD only. After rooting about a bit, I found that using bottles gets you an easy working install of the Amazon Music Windows application on Linux that allows you to play HD and UltraHD tracks. Download…
Finally decided to take network security at home a bit more seriously and put all my Internet-of-Shit devices into a contained network that I can monitor, control and isolate better. I am still in the process of setting this up and toying with both OpnSense and OpenWRT. My current plan is to run either one…
If you need to disable the physical button in CD/DVD/Blu-ray drives in Linux, you can use these instructions on Ubuntu based distributions:
I have an old Bluray internal drive that does not support UHD/4k (hardware limitation – this drive predates UHD/4K availability in consumer devices). To be able to view them on my machines, I ended up purchasing an AmazonBasics external UHD/4k capable drive. This drive turns out to be a rebadged LG BP60NB10. While the drive…
This is a write up of what I needed to do to enable passthru of NVidia discrete GPU with host access to the dGPU. System: What I want to be able to do: Apart from following the guides from my previous post, the NVidia proprietary drivers + X11 + Kernel Mode Setting combine to make…
I recently built a new home server (post about this later) and as part of this reboot decided to setup proxmox and utilize containers for improving security and isolation for different services hosted in my home server. Everything has worked quite well (another post about this later) but because I wanted to keep my old…
Here are some useful commands for managing a Proxmox server and containers:
I am setting up a new home server and before I install final headless software, I am doing burn in tests where I am using a desktop install (Kubuntu specifically). I wanted to set up remote access for the desktop. Played with different VNC servers and clients and experienced terrible latency issues on a multi-gigabit…
One of the great leaps in recent years with virtualization is PCI Express device passthrough from host to guests – this essentially allows near native access and performance of PCIe devices in VMs and leads to experiences that feel like you are running two physical computers inside one. Since this technology has evolved and matured…
This is a brief introduction to setting up and running Virtual Machines in Linux. While there are several different options to accomplish this, my preferred method is using KVM + QEMU + LibVirt. Here’s what each of these does: QEMU is a full-fledged stand-alone emulator that can emulate all kinds of hardware for virtual machines…
Finally got an NVidia 3060 and a new machine that I built now that prices for GPUs are more reasonable. I am running Manjaro on this new machine and one of the reasons for putting it together was to continue working on the FastAI book. Now the recommended approach by the authors is to use…
This was way more annoying than it should have been – I am using imwheel to increase scroll speed and wanted to set up my Manjaro 5.15 KDE environment so that it starts automatically at startup. The following things did not work: Setting up an autostart shortcut to imwheel Setting up a login script for…
This will be a place where I’ll track a running list of useful Linux utilities. convert <input_image> <output_image> ps2pdf <input_pdf> <output_pdf> cat <input_file> | tr ‘,’ ‘\n’ | tr -d ‘\[\”\] ‘
You should in general prefer to install from the official Manjaro or AUR repos whenever possible. But in the rare case (cough Microsoft Edge cough) where this is not possible, here are a sequence of steps you can follow to install a .deb package in Manjaro (and other Arch based distros) You need to install…
This is the set of steps you need to take to enable complex touchpad gestures in Manjaro (KDE, but should work for other desktop environments as well). By default, single and double finger gestures should work and are configurable in the default touchpad configuration settings. However, three finger and other gestures are not available by…
So you want to host your own web site instead of taking the easy route out with Medium, WordPress and other providers for simple blogs like these – there are a few things you need to set up. This brief guide will help you understand the different pieces to set up and providers you can…
I had set up keeweb self-hosting and also had cloudflare enabled on the domain that was doing the self-hosting. Everything was working fine until a few days ago when the self-hosted domain simply showed an empty page. Devtools console revealed that the issue was a problem with content security policy in keeweb (does not allow…
After the recent upgrade of my home server to Ubuntu 20.04, Sonos was again having trouble accessing the SMB shared folder for my music library. Turns out that the newer version of Samba in Ubuntu 20.04 turns off SMBv1 by default. Simply adding server min protocol = NT1 to /etc/samba/smb.conf and systemctl restart smbd fixed…
I finally upgraded my headless home server that was running Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 – I only run long-term support releases (LTS) builds as this is my main home server with functionality that we all depend on for managing our data and household digital storage. I used do-release-upgrade to do the upgrade. Overall, it was…
I finally followed through in setting up and sharing my Canon MP620 through my Linux homeserver with CUPS. This part is straightforward – install cups, cups-backend-bjnp (for the network communication with the MP620), gutenprint (for printer drivers) and then going to <host>:631 and adding the network printer using the printer’s static IP address (CUPS network…
I ran a bunch of updates on my Manjaro Linux laptop and noticed that printing from the laptop stopped working – this is the same setup where I was happy with how easy the setup was to print wirelessly to my MP620. The issue turns out to be the update doesn’t automatically update CUPS configuration…
Don’t overthink it – your .pyx is converted to a .c file and then converted into a Python callable extension module. This can be confusing at first – including, what language are you coding in? Essentially you are coding in Python, with some extensions/limitations that allow you to mix in some C like constructs and…
What is Cython and what do I use it for? Cython is an extension of the Python programming language that enables C/C++ and Python interop as well as speeding up Python code. There are three main use cases for Cython: Exposing functionality written in Python to native code written in C/C++ – this use case…
tl;dr: If you are having problems with the Kasa three-way switch in a four-way circuit where the Kasa app and Alexa don’t see the right state of the circuit (on/off), make sure you replace both three-way switches in the circuit with HS210 switches. That will fix the problem. For a change, I’m writing about some…
As mentioned before, I am trying to setup and run the fastai notebooks locally to get some hands-on exposure to deep learning. Unfortunately, if you are running this on Windows or have a very low-end GPU environment like myself you will run into additional problems. First, on Windows, I was hitting the error _share_cuda_ operation…
I decided to learn a little bit more about deep learning in practice and bought the Deep Learning for Coders with fastai and PyTorch: AI Applications Without a PhD book to help me get some hands-on exposure to deep learning. I did get the notebook and first examples running on gradient but I was also…
As I mentioned here, I have been running Manjaro Linux on my home laptop for almost a year now and for the most part it has worked well. My setup is that most of the useful storage is on my home server and I was mounting these as SMB shares on the laptop. Initially, I…
After a pleasant year of using Manjaro Linux on my laptop at home, I started seeing problems with SMB mounts. My setup is that I have all of the main storage on my home server which is shared through SMB shares and these shares are mounted on the laptop through SMB4k. SMB4k started doing strange…
I have been running Manjaro Linux on my main home laptop for a change for the last 9 months. Overall, experience has been excellent with almost all the hardware working very well, battery life being very good, wake from sleep being near instantaneous and the laptop being very functional for my workload. I had however…
I have been trying unsuccessfully to setup automatic wireless sync of photos and videos from our iPhones to my home server running Ubuntu. After failures with Plex camera roll upload which does not seem to work consistently, I have finally found a good alternative. The method is inefficient but has been reliable for the last…
As part of my home network setup, I have an APC UPS (XS 1500 LCD if you’re curious). I have the UPS monitoring cable hooked up to my Ubuntu home server and run apcupsd to monitor and control the UPS behavior. After I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04, I didn’t pay attention to the UPS setup…
I recently setup Pi-Hole on my Home Server to block ads at the DNS level and across devices instead of trying to set it up for each device individually. In my setup the Pi-Hole server acts as the DNS server for my network but I kept my AmplifiHD router as the DHCP server. Overall, the…
I’ve been using Sonos for over 7 years. My music folder is in my file server running Linux. I’ve setup a SMB share for this folder and add it to my Sonos music library so that Sonos has access to my music library. This setup has worked fine for the last 7 years. After my…
For the past 10 years, I was running a somewhat complicated but stable setup for my home network. It consisted of two routers – both running DD-WRT, one in bridge mode but acting as a wireless access point and the other being my main router connected to my cable modem. The wireless AP had its…
As discussed here, I recently updated the hardware on my home server. I ended up using 2x2GB of DDR3 SDRAM that I had from an older upgrade. Newegg had a great deal for 2x4GB of DDR3 SDRAM (Mushkin DDR3 1600 for $35) that I decided to jump in on. Got the memory and I decided to take a chance…
As mentioned in my previous couple of posts (here and here), I recently upgraded the hardware on my home server. I decided to document the original hardware and the new hardware (along with prices) and also write down my objectives and how I went about deciding on the hardware. I built the original version of…
As I mentioned in my earlier post here, I recently rebuilt my home server. I upgraded the Motherboard, CPU and CPU cooler. After doing some research for upgrade hardware, I settled on the AMD A8-7600 processor and the Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-D3H motherboard. This motherboard is perfect for a home server due to the 8x SATA3 ports…
After a long period of contemplation and indecision, I upgraded the hardware on my Ubuntu Home Server last weekend. I’ll write a separate post about my adventures there (mostly self-inflicted). As part of the upgrade, I also clean installed Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS. I picked up mhddfs by doing sudo apt-get install mhddfs to continue…
I recently ran into an issue where I needed to reset my Surface RT (the original version released with Windows 8, but this tip is applicable to newer versions too). The problem was that I had deleted the recovery partition and of course long forgotten the USB drive or the place where I’d stored the…
One of the nice features of Windows Home Server was that it would automatically setup dynamic DNS updates so I could access my home server (and other machines at my home through it) using a well known name even though my WAN IP address could keep changing. For e.g. I could go to foo.homeserver.com and…
About 3 weeks ago, I got an email notification from smartd that the regular SMART short check on one of the drives in my home server failed. The specific failure was a failure to read one of the sectors in the disk (current pending sector count went to 1 from 0). Now, it is hard…
One of the key goals for my Ubuntu NAS was to have the ability to create a single storage pool out of all the disks in the NAS (OS is running off a USB thumb drive) and also provide some fault tolerance such that if a single disk failed, data wasn’t lost entirely. Even though…
As part of the reorganization of my home server, I am consolidating all my music files into the home server. I quickly realized that in a misguided fit of irrationality, I had gone through a phase in the past where most of my library was in the WMA format. The problem with WMA format is…
In my home setup, we have a mix of devices (Windows 8.x, Windows RT, Windows Phone, Linux, Android and iOS). As part of my home server setup, I’ve setup Samba to share folders with the other devices – there are a few subtleties with setting up the Samba shares so you can access them with…
I was looking at my logs and noticed that smbd had crashed a few times since install. Searched the samba bug database and found this bug which was reporting the same issue. I have applied the patch supplied and updated the package – here’s how I patched and updated: In your samba source folder, run…
As part of my home server setup, one of the things I am setting up is an automated alert system that would send emails when events happen (for e.g. hard disk SMART errors, CPU temperature violation, hard disk out of space etc.). I was looking around to find the best way to send automated mail…
I am in the process of rebuilding my home server which will run Ubuntu Server – I will be putting up a series of detailed posts on my philosophy and experiences through this process. In the meantime, here’s the scoop on setting up the latest version of Samba on Ubuntu 12.04. This post provides a…
I have been using a Windows Home Server 2011 machine as my central backup and quasi-NAS solution for the past three years. About 6 months ago, I had a rather terrible experience with Windows Home Server – I have 3 other computers at home that regularly backup to the WHS every night. On my main…
I use Windows Home Server to backup all my home Windows PCs to a central location. However, lately, I have decided that I would also like to have a copy of what I deem to be critical data available offsite (in this case, outside our home) as well. I investigated cloud backup solutions – Backblaze…