Ram's Technology Notes
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…