Configuring a postfix mail relay server for the home network

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…

Multiple VLANs on single Physical Interface in Linux

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.

A practical guide to VLANs in an existing home network

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…

Monitoring and Visualization Options for OpenWRT

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…

Proxmox Useful Commands

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 😉 )

Using hardware acceleration in a Proxmox Plex container

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…

Splitting and Joining MP3 files from the command line

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…

Linking Audio Input and Output from Applications with Pipewire pw-link

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 on Linux

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…