I have a Dell Poweredge r720xd in RAID10. I've had a couple of drives fail since I've bought it and was able to buy cheap replacements on ebay.

I had another drive fail recently and one of the spare ebay drives came up as "blocked". It put me out a few days while I waited for a new one to arrive; also from ebay.

I'd like to avoid getting another dud drive. Are there any reputable resellers of these old drives so I can stock up on some spares?

I’ve made a few posts in the past about my experimentation with connecting various devices and servers over a VPN (hub and spoke configuration) as well as my struggles adapting my setup towards a mesh network.

I recently decided to give a mesh setup another go. My service of choice is Nebula. Very easy to grasp the system and get it up and running.

My newest hurdle is now enabling access to the nebula network at the same time as being connected to my VPN service. At least on iOS, you cannot utilize a mesh network and a VPN simultaneously.

TLDR: Is it a bad or a brilliant idea to connect my iOS device to a nebula mesh network to access for example my security camera server, as well as route all traffic/web requests through another nebula host that has a VPN such as mullvad on it so I can use my phone over a VPN connection while still having access to my mesh network servers?

As the title says, I'm trying to multiboot Fedora 40 and Ubuntu 24. The documentation and guides for this all seems pretty outdated through my searching and troubleshooting.

I currently have ubuntu installed. My drive partition table looks like this:

• sda1 -- EFI (250MB)
• sda2 -- /boot (ext4, 2GB)
• sda3 -- empty (ext4, 2TB) <-- Fedora partition
• sda4 -- Ubuntu 24 (LUKS encrypted, 2TB)

I'm trying to install Fedora now and it's giving me nothing but errors. The most useful guide I found for this specific setup just has you adding sda3 as the installation path (mounted at /) for Fedora and it's supposed to figure out the EFI and boot, but that doesn't happen. In fact, the EFI and /boot partitions show up under an "Unknown" tab in the Fedora custom partition window of the installation. They should be under a tab such as "Ubuntu 24 LTS". Fedora isn't recognizing the ubuntu installation (because it's encrypted?)

Am I wrong in assuming that both OS's should be sharing the EFI and /boot partitions? Maybe that's the issue?

Anybody out there successfully dual booting Linux distros with both distros encrypted?

For years I’ve had a dream of building a rack mounted PC capable of splitting its resources to host multiple GPU intensive VMs:

• a few gaming VMs
• a VM for work that can run Davinci Resolve and Blender renders
• an LLM server
• a Stable Diffusion server
• media server

Just to name a few possibilities…

Everytime I’ve looked into it, it seemed like the technology just wasn’t there yet. I remember a few years ago Linus TT took a shot at it, but in the end suggested the technology (for non-commercial entities) just wasn’t in a comfortable spot yet.

So how far off are we? Obviously AI focused companies seem to make it work, but what possibilities exist for us self-hosters who might also want to run multiple displays in addition to the web gui LLM servers? And without forking out crazy money for GPU virtualization software licenses?

HACS has a problem with hitting the GitHub rate limit when you first install it. It’s not really that big of a deal. You usually just need to wait an hour for the local database to populate.

It used to be optional to link your GitHub to HACS to bypass the rate limiting but now it seems the installation requires it.

I’m not a fan of this as somebody who uses Homeassistant for its privacy values and am kind of frustrated HACS removed the ability to install without a GitHub API key.

Is there a manual way to override the API linking process?

Would this work or would I have problems:

Using dd command to backup an entire SSD containing dual boot Windows/Ubuntu partitions into an .iso file, with the intent to then dd that iso back onto the same size SSD in the case of a drive failure?

I’m solidly leaning towards a Schlage Connect Lock due to its local only Zwave capabilities (which has the benefit of also extending battery life). I was strongly considering the Aqara U100 for its many features, but based on what I’ve seen I can foresee it being a nightmare to get working locally with home assistant and the need for a phone app makes me fear for long term support.

I use the Schlage Encode for other houses and love the way it looks and how easy it is to setup and use. I really wish they would make a Zwave version with the same hardware.

So before I jump in and buy the Schlage Connect, is there anybody who has experience with either of the locks I’ve mentioned? Feel free to chime in if you have a different lock that you think beats out these.

I tried my hand at rigging a proximity sensor to the water meter in my house. Sadly it doesn’t have the spinning magnet for the sensor to pick up.

I looked into other options for pulling data from the meter, but for each method, my very antiquated meter had a complication that would prevent it from working.

TLDR: Any recommendations for a home water meter that’s local and integrates well with home assistant?

I’m going to check with my water company first, but likely will remove the old meter and replumb a new “smart” meter and an automated shut off valve into the water supply. I believe the current meter is leftover from before the utility added new meters further upstream, so I’d rather get rid of the rusty piece of junk anyway.

I've attempted to create a VM on my ubuntu host machine that is accessing the internet via a dedicated VPN app. I'm able to disconnect my host VPN and access the web within the VM, but cannot access the web when the host VPN is enabled. Ideally I'd like to enable the VPN on the host and pass through web access to the VM.

I have two questions:

1. If my use case is to use a VM to increase privacy and security as well as isolate my operations within the VM from my host, is it better to have the VPN app from inside the VM or pass the host's through to the VM?
2. If it doesn't make much of a difference, how can I go about passing the host's VPN to the VM?

In either scenario, I'd still like to keep the host's VPN active while being able to use the VM, which I currently cannot.

I'm following the settings on WLED's wiki for the WS2814 strip:

6-LED groups (24V) as one logical LED. Must be controlled as SK6812 type, color order: BRG, swap W and G (this option is available since WLED 0.14.0-b1)

But the lights just flicker like crazy. Switching WLED settings definitely does something, but not the intended effect.

Using the domestic automations controller. On the latest WLED firmware. LEDs are powered directly by a 24V 10A PSU. Originally I thought my data cable was too long but it still has all the issues plugged directly into the controller.

Has anybody got these strips working? Is the WLED wiki wrong?

I have a backup server running Proxmox Backup and OMV in separate VMs. OMV provides the storage as an NFS to the proxmox backup server VM.

I have multiple remote servers that connect to the proxmox backup server but recently I keep having issues with backups. Something about file lock estale.

Is there an alternative to NFS I can use in OMV to provide the storage for the proxmox backup server?

I know there are vastly different configuration options, but I have some other things set up with OMV so I’m kinda stuck on that.

Try as I might, due to the abundance of various types of low voltage wire connector types, I can't seem to find exactly what I'm looking for.

I do a lot of LED strips and DC powered automations and I've used many Wagos and soldered some stuff in place. These tend to have some problems though. Wagos can take up too much space, especially when connecting power to LED strips that can't be tucked away. Soldering in place sucks and usually ends with a poor connection. LED snap on clips are ridiculously unreliable and weak connections. Barrel connectors are nice and small but the connection has the potential to pull out.

The holy grail IMO would be a very small plastic two wire housing that can clip together like a plastic belt buckle or those connectors that often come with 12V DC batteries in battery backups/motorized kids toys. I have no idea what term to search for to find these.

Anybody got any hints?

I like the idea of presoldering these onto the ends of LED strips in lieu of barrel connectors, so once you are ready to install in the location it's as easy as snapping in place. If the LEDs burn out it can be replaced easily as well.