When you’re trying to turn your homelab into SkyNet, it helps to start with a blueprint. So before we dive into the debugging hijinks, existential model crises, and browser-induced gaslighting that dominated this chapter, let’s start with the real architecture I built, the one that turned my homelab into a fully offline, containerized AI city‑state,…
There’s a saying in engineering that “everything works perfectly—right up until you actually try it.” This blog post is about one of those journeys. A technical adventure where I set out with a bold vision, built a lot of infrastructure, wrestled with more containers than a shipping port, and ultimately arrived at one undeniable conclusion:…
A Tale of Fans, Frustration, and Finally Figuring It Out Introduction What began as a simple mission—“Make the fans go brrrr”—quickly transformed into an unexpected deep dive into the mysterious inner workings of nvidia-settings on a headless Linux box. As any good homelab tinkerer knows, nothing is ever truly simple, especially when GPUs are involved….
This is a longer post so here is a Table of Contents Migration Attempt #Two So this is my second attempt to migrate away from VMware’s platform. This one went better then last time, though there were some causalities along the way. Namely all my Windows VMs. The reason for the migration has not changed,…
The Backstory It is coming up on time to renew my VMug advantage, but with VMware dropping support for a lot of older hardware, plus Broadcom’s statement about not really caring about any one but their 5 biggest customers. I figure I should migrate to a more open source solution, plus my wallet will feel…
This assumes you already have expanded the hard drive within VMware or VirtualBox, or whatever your virtualization solution you use. You will also need to make sure parted is installed on the system you are working on. This guide is using GNU parted 3.1 Disclaimer: Parted is a partition modification tool make sure you have…
So I have some disks I got from a friend, he got them off ebay and they didn’t work for him, he couldn’t get his RAID controller to format them at all. After doing some research I came to the conclusion he didn’t have the equipment needed to reformat them. I offered to buy them…
So my whitebox ESXi server doesn’t have drivers for ESXi out of the box the following is how I created a custom image with the necessary drivers. Requirements Procedure Create a folder to work in, in that folder create a folder labeled “Offline” Get the ESXi 6.7 Offline depot files and put them in the…
So I had a hard drive crash due to a power outage. The disk was partly functional and I was able to pull most of the .ibd files and spent 15 hours rebuilding the database table by table. I recovered most of what I needed but not having an automated backup really bit me in…
So last night I finally got around to configuring my minecraft servers to start with the OS. The server hosting my minecraft servers is running CentOS 7. I run CentOS because Red Hat 9 was my first linux OS and I have since preferred RPM based systems over DEB based. Also CentOS is closer to…
