Alex Kretzschmar

A Cheap No-Frills OPNsense box

If you're looking to build a small, quiet and cheap box to run OPNsense on then I have a build you might be interested in. This box has been happily

technical

I need your help with Intel Quick Sync benchmarking!

Please help me benchmark as many Intel CPUs Quick Sync transcoding performance as possible!

electronics

X32 Rack Mixer PSU Replacement

I bought a used unit off of Reverb and after about 75 days the unit began exhibiting these symptoms in the video. Neither Reverb nor the seller cared any so I began the hunt for a fix.

tailscale

SplitDNS magic with Tailscale

Today, we're going to take a deep dive into the world of DNS. Specifically looking at Tailscale's magicDNS feature which allows us to do neat things like refer to our Tailnet devices by name or configure splitDNS to query remote DNS servers.

technical

I have a YouTube channel now.

This week I launched a YouTube channel. After many years of saying I would and not, I finally have. So here goes nothing! I'll be covering topics ranging such as

technical

Mapping sensors output to physical drives in Linux

Whilst building out some new Grafana dashboards over the weekend I made the switch from InfluxDB to Promtheus node exporters for scraping metrics from Linux servers. But how do you marry up the drivetemp-scsi-0-10 value output from sensors to a physical disk?

technical

Use 1 PiKVM instance to control 4 systems

And there we have it. One PiKVM able to control and view up to 4 systems at once. And with the addition of a USB thumb drive to the KVM we can even boot any ISO we want!

technical

Restricting ASRock Rack BMC to dedicated IPMI_LAN port only

During this process I came across a frustrating "bug" in the Asrock Rack BMC implementation. No matter the settings I gave the BMC it was getting two IP addresses. One on the IPMI_LAN port as expected in my management VLAN, and another on eth0 which is undesirable.

Fully automated DNS and DHCP with Ansible, Dnsmasq and Pihole

You do like declarative configurations don't you? Good! For the longest time I've made do with clicking through the Opnsense UI to add static IP reservations via MAC address mapping.

ansible

Check for duplicate items in a list with Ansible using a custom filter

I expected writing a custom filter was going to be difficult and cumbersome but it was very simple and in the end, much faster than trying to turn YAML into a programming language!

2022 in review

A wedding. Lots of travel. And lots of friends.

photography

Death Valley

These desert vistas absolutely boggle my little mind. Most people come to Las Vegas for the brash, expensive and over the top spectacle. Indeed, it is fun for a night or two. But given the choice between a night in Vegas or another night on those dunes, there's simply no contest.

technical

Dump Disqus for Giscus

This is an easy project. Sure it will probably take an hour or two to get your head around but don't put it off. The end result is great and means no ads or tracking are insidiously injected into your content anymore.

docker

Configuring Traefik on Synology DSM7 using docker macvlans

Recent changes in DSM7 have made guaranteeing being able to free up ports 80/443 for use by traefik rather difficult. Using a combination of several advanced techniques with docker networking we can circumvent this requirement once and for all with the macvlan driver.

cars

VW Golf Mk4 R32 - Front Axles Replacement

I recently acquired a VW Golf Mk4 R32 from 2004 with 136k miles on the clock. All things considered it's in great shape but there are a few spots which

technical

Gitea Webhook Change

A while back I wrote about deploying DroneCI and Gitea together to build projects automatically. A few months ago my CI broke and I've only just now gotten around to

technical

Eliminating 3D Printer vibration noise transmission

If you've been wanting to make your 3D printer quieter then these Sorbothane feet are the best way to do this. Using 6 of these little squash ball like rubber

mkdocs

Making mkdocs tables look like Github markdown tables

Adding custom CSS to the mkdocs material theme is straightforward. Follow the docs and you can make tweaks to the CSS of the theme as you need. I'm a big

docker

Monolithic docker-compose files filtered with profiles

Those of us who use docker-compose to manage our fleets of containers generally fall into two camps. Camp A prefers one monolithic docker-compose file per host using docker-compose <command&

docker

Deploying mkdocs using DroneCI and Gitea

Todays post will discuss the steps required to deploy a fully self-hosted, automatically updating documentation stack using Gitea, mkdocs, nginx, traefik and Drone CI.

synology

Access a Synology NAS with Traefik on DSM7

With the recent update to DSM7 my Synology NAS has been transformed. It now runs a recent version of docker, I can use Ansible to manage docker-compose like I do

networking

Punching through tricky NAT with Nebula Mesh VPN and OPNSense

OPNsense rewrites all outgoing UDP traffic by default - here's how to make Nebula work whilst traversing NAT which does this.

technical

ASRock Rack E3C246D4U - The Perfect Media Server Motherboard?

The board only arrived today but I've gotten it working in a couple of hours exactly the way I wanted. It really is about as close to perfect as we're going to get in this space. Should you buy one? Yes, if you need it - you should!

technical

Roborock S5 Zoned Cleanup for Valetudo 2021.06

Here's how to configure segment based cleanup for Valetudo based Robovacs.

technical

PiKVM - Control up to 4 servers simultaneously

This is every homelabbers dream isn't it? Controlling multiple systems that don't have IPMI natively, remotely. Thanks to PiKVM, now we can.