Ram's Technology Notes
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: