Chewie
@Chewie@slrpnk.net
I run a Mastodon instance (mammut.gogreenit.net) for myself and friends.
I am interested in IT, Electronic Music, Winter Sports, Renewable Energy, Off-Grid living, Sustainability and The RIght to Repair.
- Comment on [Recommendation request] Simple monitoring? 2 days ago:
ntfy is great!
- Comment on Where to begin? 2 days ago:
Also i know some basics on raid but I’ve only ever messed with raid0 with usb drives on a pi. I have 8 bays but 2 are currently vacant. What is the process of just adding an extra drive to a raid, or replacing one that already exists?
It depends on your RAID controller (or software RAID). I use hardware RAID (on Dell and HP servers) as it’s easy and a known technology, although these days people seem to be anti-HW RAID a bit.
When replacing a drive, you just eject the old drive, wait a few seconds put the new drive in, and most HW RAID controllers will start automatically rebuilding the array. Make sure your controller and drive bays support “hot swap” first! With HW RAID, replacing drives is great, because you can increase the capacity over time, because you can replace each drive with a bigger model, and once the last drive has been swapped over, you can expand the array and start using the extra capacity without having to move data around. With HW raid, most servers have an “Out-Of-Band” system (iLO, iDRAC, IPMI) which you can configure to alert you if a drive has died (or is about to die).
I would recommend keeping at least 1 spare of the same model HD of whatever you use, just in case.
I got burned by having a WD drive fail, and WD were being assholes about sending me a replacement (it was under warranty). Before I got the replacement, another drive started dying, and I couldn’t afford to buy another drive. In the end I lost 12TB of data 😭
And re the above - “RAID is not a backup” :) plan accordingly…
For software RAID, most Linux OSes support it automatically. I only use it as it’s easy to expand partitions (most of my Linux machines are VMs on a system with HW RAID).
This might be a useful article howtogeek.com/…/how-to-manage-and-use-lvm-logical… (with a link to a previous one which is an introduction), which explains a bit about SW RAID.
- Comment on Where to begin? 2 days ago:
I rate OPNsense. I’ve not tried pfsense, but I use Enterprise-level firewalls daily. When you’re used to Palo Alto, Cisco or CheckPoint firewalls, it is a lot harder to use, and the interface isn’t great, and had fewer features, but for free (and cheap support if you need it), it’s pretty amazing. Upgrading to new versions is seamless, and once when something happened and it broken, I reinstalled it from the .ISO, uploaded my backed up .xml config file, and it was back to normal. It’s more than adequate to use for my home internet connection and all the services I run in my DMZ etc.
- Comment on Hosting files on the LAN to trusted folks at a LAN party -- FTP? 3 months ago:
This had potential: github.com/adulau/Forban, and i tried it at a hacker festival soon after it was released, but sadly it is rather rudimentary and hasn’t been updated in over a decade, which is a real shame. I did try and contact the developer years ago with some bug reports, but heard nothing 😢
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
Not sure how Porn = Terrorism. Sounds like mission creep to me… Oh well, I guess it makes a change from using Anti-Terror laws to stop people putting the wrong things in wheelie bins: telegraph.co.uk/…/Half-of-councils-use-anti-terro…
- Comment on Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US 9 months ago:
Got a link? that name isn’t very unique :(
- Comment on Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US 9 months ago:
I like the MorningStar brand, but they aren’t cheap. I wrote a review here if you’re interested: www.gogreenit.net/index.php?page=morningstar-tris…
- Submitted 9 months ago to energy@slrpnk.net | 10 comments
- Comment on Solar panels between railway tracks? 10 months ago:
True, but it still seems rather excessive…
- Submitted 10 months ago to energy@slrpnk.net | 57 comments
- Comment on What inspired you to get into clean energy? 10 months ago:
I like camping and festivals, and it was fun to get a small solar panel to charge my phone etc. about a decade ago. My parents were in to gardening, and used a lot of water butts to store water at our house. My other half and I watched a lot of Doomsday Prepper episodes (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Preppers) during Covid lockdowns, and while some of them were a bit crazy, others had really good ideas. It felt like a sensible idea to try and be a bit more self-sufficient.
It will all take a long time to pay for itself, but I am learning about DC circuits and it feels good to have a backup for everything, even though we live in a city and are grid-connected to water, electricity and gas.