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Over the weekend, I was digging through the expansive parts bin known as the computer room and I had my old Unifi Video NVR jump off the shelf at me. While the Unifi Video product has long since been discontinued, giving way to the Unifi Protect line of NVRs and products, the hardware itself still has a bit of life left to it. In this article, I’ll go over the hardware of the derelict product and see what we can do with it going forward.

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Just like with most things, IT equipment has to evolve over time and wireless connectivity is one of those things. The company I work for decided to replace their aging Ruckus controllers and access points with Meraki access points (The decision was way above my paygrade) so that left a treasure trove of hardware behind that was destined for the waste bin. In this article, I’ll talk about the HA pair of the SmartZone100 controllers from Ruckus, their hardware capabilities, and what I plan on doing with my pair.

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The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is a US Nationwide alerting platform that uses a combination of terrestrial radio and television broadcasters to get an urgent message out to as many people as possible. In this article, we’ll be setting up the TFT EAS-911 ENDEC so we can receive these messages without being dependent on cellular service or Internet access.

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In Part 1, I discussed the research, physical installation, a bit of maintenance, and the overall basic operation of the Generac 22kW Guardian whole home generator. In this post, we’ll go over the monitoring of the generator and quickly outline the vendor’s supplied option as well as the Open Source option I decided on, and even up contributing to! Yes, even though I’m not a developer, I managed to contribute to an Open Source project and helped the developer out!

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Being a homeowner isn’t for the faint of heart, there’s always a chance for things to go wrong, especially considering that we’re in Texas and well… *gestures at the Valentine’s day week of February 2021*. So with that being said, as soon as the ink was dry on our house contract and we had closed, I was already in process of soliciting for a standby whole home generator. This three part article will cover everything from the decision making process of the generator and its installation (this article), how I monitor the generator using GenMon, an opensource application suite on Github (Part II), and lastly, how I implemented Grafana, Prometheus, and SNMP Exporter (Part III) to get the level of monitoring I am comfortable with.

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This quick hack is a quick “need to know” list of Linux’s smartctl commands for hard drive diagnosis. I highly recommend using a USB drive dock for analyzing suspect drives. These commands are OS agnostic provided you’re running the vendor provided smartctl for either Linux or BSD.

For the purposes of this article, /dev/sdb is the drive under test. Make sure you know which /dev entry corresponds with the desired drive.

smartctl -a /dev/sdb Shows all smart attributes of /dev/sdb including test results, and drive make, model, and serial number.

smartctl -t short /dev/sdb Performs a “short” online test of /dev/sdb. Does not print test results. Does not test disk surface readability.

smartctl -t long /dev/sdb Performs a “long” offline test of /dev/sdb. Does not print test results. Tests the entire disk surface for readability and reallocates bad sectors. If your system is under a lot of disk I/O to the disk under test, this will cause the test to take longer to complete (hence running it in a USB dock or other non-system location)

smartctl -c /dev/sdb Estimates how long the disk check will take in minutes (Usually is wrong though, I wouldn’t set my watch by it.)

smartctl -l selftest /dev/sdb Shows the SMART test results table (instead of smartctl -a which shows EVERYTHING).

smartctl -X /dev/sdb Cancels a test in progress.

NOTES: Re-running smartctl -t against a drive already testing will show an error message which includes how long the test will take to complete (unlike smartctl -l, this time is actually more closer to reality).

In some installations that support it, hdparm -S 0 /dev/sdb will prevent a disk from going to sleep, however in theory, the disk should never sleep if it’s under an active test. This will not stop an ACPI sleep or hibernate event from shutting down the disk.

Happy hacking!
FIRESTORM_v1

Internet access on cruise ships is now a common occurrence and more commonly, I get frequent questions on how to “game” the system and get Internet access without paying for it.  The short of it is, you’re going to have to purchase at least one account to get anything online.  The long of it lies in the rest of this article and it’ll be up to you to decide if it’s worth the effort.  Quick spoiler alert:  For me it wasn’t, and I ended up buying another access to get myself and my wife online at the same time.  While it was a punch in the pocketbook, it was a lot cheaper to pay money to resolve than the costs incurred in other areas (time, frustration, etc.).

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In this article, I’ll be going over my setup for being able to join my camper’s wireless network to a host wireless network (RV park wifi, state park wifi, etc..) with the purpose of maintaining security and convenience between switching wireless networks.  Even though you’re on-the-go, you shouldn’t sacrifice security for convenience of park wifi, and at the same time, changing the wireless configuration on a slew of devices is inconvenient at best and maddening at worst.  First I’ll cover why you want to consider this method versus other methods, then I’ll itemize a product list, then finally we’ll jump right into configuration.  When we’re done, you’ll have your trusted wireless network all set up and ready for your devices.

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Everyone knows that in most if not all devices, batteries are considered a wear item, an item that’s designed to be replaced at certain intervals of a machine’s lifetime. (Ok, unless you’re Samsung… or Apple… or any one of a bunch of stupid laptop vendors)  Enterprise level servers are no exception.  What is outrageous though is these consumables are usually stupidly expensive and can be repaired for much less than the replacement part.  In this case (and this post), I saved myself about $63 by building my own replacement battery pack for my HP SmartArray P400 raid card.

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It might not look like much, but the switch used as this feature image has more to offer than one would think judging by appearances.  In this article, we will be converting a “stupid” switch into a “smart” switch for the purposes of controlling a connected GE Light Bulb over Z-wave and discuss why you’d want to look for a stupid switch for smart devices in the first place. (continue reading…)