On the continuing efforts of technology..

So I had an old laptop that was too few in resources to do much with in a particularly useful sense, but I decided that it would work remarkably well as a ripping machine. That is, a dedicated machine with a blu-ray drive capable of ripping movies and TV episodes to its harddrive and then move to the media server. I still use Plex to serve the media (something I'm contemplating alternatives to since Plex has decided they are going to make things difficult without you paying a subscription for their shite), and overall it's a pretty good system. I'm able to reach the server via VPN, which means all I need is an internet connection, and I can stream content from the server nearly anywhere I go. The criteria for media to the server has mostly been stuff I think I'll want to watch repeatedly. Or in the case of TV series, stuff I don't want to have to change discs over and over if I'm gonna binge it. So far, that works pretty well. It's an effort to do it, but having a dedicated machine means I can set a disc to do its thing, and go on about my business.

So that old laptop... blew a bearing in the CPU fan... and while at least for the time being, it wasn't keeping the laptop from running, it did make the room sound like it was under invasion from toy airplanes.

The laptop was old, and fairly resource poor, but I had another older laptop that I hadn't given up on yet that had better resources, but was missing bits. So I pulled out the hard drive, and moved it to the other laptop, refreshed it with a desktop Linux, tweaked the drivers, and then I was up and running again!

I like to use MakeMKV to rip my discs. It is pretty solid and works really well. And it turns out they have a Linux version, so I was able to get the ease of use in the new environment. Yay!

That of course meant that I needed to look into the server since we were running at nearly 80% utilization of about 2 terabytes. Time to roll through some disks.

The machine doesn't have a lot of space to add more disks, so it meant an in-place upgrade of the existing array.. .which... is kinda dangerous. It involves failing disks one at a time and replacing them and allowing them to rebuild. Then failing each of the next in turn, replacing, etc. It works ok, but without protection, it is possible that if a second disk fails while you're resilvering your replacement drive, you'll lose the whole array. But.... since the critical difficult-to-replace data is already backed up (twice, tyvm), the only thing I'd lose is time if I lost what was left. Kids, back up your stuff if it's critical. If you can't afford to lose the data, don't upgrade this way. Build a new array.. and if you can't, build a new box and move the data from the existing array.

Thankfully the upgrade went well. The idea is that you replace your existing disks with larger ones, and once all the drives get replaced and are the same size, you can then upgrade your storage structure to take advantage of the larger space. It was nice to finally have some breathing room again.

I have a feeling, if just for flexibility sake, the next upgrade will need to find a new home.

On the flip side, the last time the entire server took a dump, I never did rebuild my data drives that house things like my ebook collection and other non-media files, so now that I have some space, I can restore some backups and get that back up on the server again.

It's been a fun little project. And maybe one of these days, I'll have a proper server space to build proper equipment. But I'm having fun in the meantime. :-)

The automation stuff continues apace. I've noticed a few bugs in the code for some of the lighting stuff that I need to nail down. We have a set of four lights on automation that, when we shut off the room, each set of two shuts off with a delay. It isn't so much a problem as a curiosity. I have some ideas for mood lighting scenes and continued work on some other parts of the house. I still get a thrill though out of leaving the bedroom area and punching one button and knowing that ALL of the lights in the bedrooms and hall will shut off. I'm working on rearranging my bedroom, and once that's done, I think the next step will be installing a motion sensor with intent to trigger the under-bed lights.

Have you set up under-bed lights? Even if they aren't automated, they are the best things in the world. Nice low level light on the floor that you can turn on in the middle of the night so you don't stumble on anything when you go to the bathroom. Or lights you can leave on when you go to bed so your partner doesn't stumble on things when they come to bed. Just a simple rope light is all you need. Or even a long string of Christmas lights. :-)

I've been working on getting the guest wireless working, and for some reason, the DHCP is being a pain. I've heard that it is not unusual for the DHCP to be loved by anyone... wait.. no. :-) (You're welcome!) Not unusual for the DHCP server on the router to be slow when serving VLAN networks. I'm contemplating the idea of building out a separate server to do the heavy lifting and see if that works better. Part of the problem is that I'm still not entirely sure that the VLAN tagging is working right, so it is possible that clients connect to the network, and just aren't getting traffic through. More work and investigation ensuing.

Circling back to the automation, once the guest network is working correctly, it will be time to look into wifi automation stuff.. I deliberately have not used it because I don't want that stuff living where our laptops and servers live. Now that I can segregate it, it will be much safer!

AND NO VOICE STUFF... No Google Home.. No Amazon crap. It is bad enough that both Google and Facebook follow me around the web enough that I get creepy ads after having chat conversations about certain things. I appreciate that we agree to certain terms and conditions and that they feel they need to make money, but seriously... it is already bad enough.

And finally, I'm contemplating digitizing some of my favorite books that don't exist in ebook form. That too is a bit of an effort, but I had some success with a test piece I did. It is kinda cool. So more to that soon.

Anything exciting from a technology perspective in your life? New phone? New computer? Whatcha got going on?