Token's lvl1 blog- edit -- Token's rantings

Token · August 22, 2023, 5:19pm

Been neglecting this thread, I’ve made a proxmox host with some cool stuff but not into documenting stuff much anymore.

A weird glitch and PSA on my First Alert Z-Wave Smoke Detector: It started to do the low battery chirp which freaks out the dog. Took it down, took the batteries out, before replacing I went into home assistant log viewer, there were no logs of any sort from the device outside of the ordinary. Battery level was fine, heartbeat fine.

Put the old batteries in, HA shows at 79%.

So either a bug/glitch, or another time I’ve gotten them to chirp like this was with a 50 watt ham radio lol, and I believe it made log entries when it happened. So pretty odd it started to chirp but the firmware output “all is normal” logs.

Token · August 28, 2023, 11:07pm

Always trust your IT instinct…

Playing around with SYnology’s container GUI there was a screen that showed if your containers had an update, and a simply one-click to update them.

Instead of googling what should be best practice I went YOLO and clicked update for my pi-hole.

Updated, was able to go into the GUI- success, awesome.

Clicked “update” for heimdall. Now its in a start-up loop. And I lost control, meaning I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t change settings on the container, I couldn’t delete it- Synology would have a pop-up could not make changes as the system is busy or network issue.

Then I got a real network issue, laptop lost internet. I think some kind of network loop/storm happened. My other laptop on a VLAN was un-affected (thanks to rules). But my LAN access was not affected, just WAN/internet. Weird. Started to suspect my pi-hole update and old macvlan settings had something to do with this, but I stopped the pi-hole and still had all of these issues.

Googling how to roll back, of course I should had taken steps at backing some things up. Wundertech had a good synology specific page on a smooth way to backup and update, and restore if necessary.

I managed to catch the Heimdall loop at just the right time to force stop it and then deleted it.

So there you go kids, google best practices, how to backup, rollback etc- prepare for the worst. Now my super convenient Heimdall page I made as my Home Page on my browsers is gone. And my boomer “I like VMs more” opinion is boosted as any typical hypervisor it would have been a quick one-click operation to make a snapshot. Docker is a little more complicated, actually IMO a lot more complicated if you are not nix literate like me.

Thankfully I followed Wundertech’s original Heimdall install page. Wundertech Synology container tutorials go the extra mile to create folders in the docker folder, and then map them inside the new container configuration. I deleted the old container, then installed from a new download and in settings pointed to the old config folder on the file share side- seems to be totally restored now, albeit I have to use different port settings now.

Token · August 28, 2023, 11:20pm

Since I’m in there (synology docker) messing around, went ahead and installed portainer cause why not.

Shadowbane · August 29, 2023, 2:45am

Since you use Synology products, I was wondering how do you like their products. I know most forum members use TrueNas Scale. I am looking for a disk shelf rack system, that can hold abot 10 disks and about 120 TB of data and still have room to grow. Right now I am looking at Synology, TrueNas Core, and 45 Drives. I have a quote from 45 Drives of 12,000. I think that quote does not included the hard disks or any expansion. I had an appointment with the local TrueNas rep but it got rescheduled because he had a family emergency for the 12th of September. So I do not know at this time, if a TrueNad system would be any less exspensive than 45 Drives.

Token · August 29, 2023, 4:23am

If its only about costs, then truenas.

Ease of use + lots of documentation, Synology

I dont know much about 45 drives, in fact i know nothing except they have a good relationship with the selfhosted podcast. Seem like a good group of people.

Anymore details on your usecase?

Token · August 30, 2023, 8:06pm

WOW, so this is cool.

Offline wiki

https://download.kiwix.org/zim/

I grabbed the wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2023-08.zim
(wiki, english, max size (all pics etc))

And then form MS store, Kiwix JS

Open Kiwix JS and point to the saved zim file, and bam, offline Wiki:

I would have thought one would need to script up something to crawl and grab everything from Wiki, and then also self host something like an nginx or apache server. Something my synology could do, but this is so much easier and extensible to other devices if air gapped.

Token · September 19, 2023, 10:17pm

Well, rather than just spit explicitives and hate, I’ll try to be more analytical:

It appears to me that consumer APCs are more danger than danger mitigation.

I don’t have hard numbers from business grade units from work, but that shouldn’t count anyhow, that is different hardware and I’m talking about the BestBuy consumer models.

Enter my data: I have two APC brand battery backups. A small 550 and a big 1500

I have the 550 a few years longer. When its first battery degraded (boggles my mind they are designed in a way that allows for such fast degradation) it causes the whole APC to fail- not send alarms, beeps etc and simply not be performant during a power outage, but it BECOMES YOUR POWER OUTAGE.

Later, one of the batteries in the 1500 started to leak, over time the acid literally ate through a part of the conductor and caused an open in the series battery circuit. Same as the 550, this causes total POWER OUTAGE failure.

Enter today, the 550 went down on me yet again, taking out pretty much my entire home network as my 16 port switch, PoE Unifi, various PoE cameras, ISP modem AND pfSense router is all power off of it. BONUS points it borked my UFS formatted pfSense HDD.

I’m about to pull the 550 down and do a post mortem but I’ve become convinced screw all these units. My regions grid has been far more reliable than these APCs, I think my APCs are now 1:1 caused as many power outages as they have buffered me from.

I’d love to do a Mark Furneaux retrofit of supercaps in place of the battery

But his model is different than mine, I don’t think any of the PCB mods would be remotely the same.

I’m at a fork in the road- I’m either going to go APC’less, or have to step up to some higher grade/brand that doesn’t fail in such an ironic state.

TimHolus · September 20, 2023, 2:02pm

An alternative to the typical battery power supply would be to purchase an invention based only on a super capacitor large enough to allow time to start the generator. Now there are quite quiet and small solutions.

I once had a cheap UPS destroy my wooden floor and almost burn down my house. I wake up at night and I feel like there’s something wrong with the air, like it’s burning or something. I go and look and what I see… burning plastic with a small but open flame and a leak in the UPS battery.

Token · September 20, 2023, 2:37pm

My 1500 almost did this, hunting down the pics now and will post

Token · September 20, 2023, 2:43pm

Token · September 20, 2023, 2:53pm

I think I’ve seen some LiPo versions of UPS in the consumer world and I’d be game to try those. IMO all three issues with my APC/UPCs has been around the lead acid batteries (and how the UPS is engineered around them).

I’d like a supercap version even more- less capacity but both APCs are plugged into systems that will gracefully shut down when told they are on emergency power.

Token · September 22, 2023, 4:14pm

Anti-rant

Home assistant’s reollink plugin detected my NVRs firmware and informed me a newer version was out, not even the reollink app does this. Neat.

Token · October 8, 2023, 1:37am

Welp, call me bitter but im not putting an APC back into a critical circuit at home. Both models I have have introduced more down time than how reliable my power is here. With the NAS running btrfs and scrubs, and pfsense on zfs ill wing it on mains power.

So im looking for a use case for my APCs. Im thinking on some of my plugged in lights and lamps so in a power outage we dont just go suddenly dark. When the subpar charge circuit inevitably destroys the battery and thus knocks the APC randomly offline, no big deal.

Token · October 13, 2023, 1:31am

Random google search and someone makes a lithium variant of the battery for the apc be550g. Sucks it’s sold out. If i can get it, i just might put the 550 back into network rotation.

Token · November 21, 2023, 7:09am

Interesting, so YouTube seemlessly updated some time ago to be able to control a Chromecast even if not connected to the home network?

I’ve been turning wifi off on my phone more often lately because reasons, forgot i had it off when at home. Was watching YouTube via the Chromecast that has a remote, got on the YouTube app on the phone and got the typical prompt asking of i wanted to connect with the Chromecast. Then suddenly realized “wait im not even on the LAN”. Connected/synced with the Chromecast no issue, in a double take i ensured i didn’t have tailscale running abd i couldn’t get into my NAS.

Cool i guess, no crazy tech here, if anything what took them so long to roll this out?

Token · December 9, 2023, 4:20pm

Larger pi4 case arrived fitting the PoE hat better.

Build is for openwebrx plus:

An SDR (software defined radio) based image to be used with SDR hardware. For some reason I really really wanted this PoE powered.

Already decoding some packets over the HAM 2m band!

Token · December 12, 2023, 11:03pm

Sure Lowes… sure.

Token · December 14, 2023, 4:17pm

@cityle just a shout out to AccuBattery-

I have a now ancient Samsung laptop and one of it’s features was a setting to never let the battery charge past 80%. To this day nearly 10 years later the original battery life is amazing. So I took this approach to cell phones as well and my 5 year old OP6 battery life is still nearly all day long/near new performance.

What sucked is I had to stay on top of it manually. Only phone I know that had an OS level 80% stoppage is the Asus gamer phone, or you had to ROM your phone.

The AccuBattery (I think it was a reddit post that suggested this app) is a nice compromise- the security level of later android won’t let an app control when to turn off charging and hover at 80% but the next best thing is the AccuBattery app will send out a notification (to a smart watch etc) and sound an alarm when you hit 80% on the charger. Very nice feature as I quickly forget to check on my phone’s charge as it sits on a wireless charger.

Token · December 17, 2023, 9:54pm

Making a Raspi 4 steamlink (my pi 3 had some bad input lag) and with the newer OS the same old steps for the 3 no longer apply.

I had to set the pi to boot into terminal, steamlink can’t be run from GUI:

Blockquote1. Change your settings to have the RPi boot into text console mode instead of GUI
sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target and reboot
(you can change back to GUI anytime by systemctl set-default graphical.target and reboot)
And so now it boots into terminal.

(OR you can type in raspi-config and change to boot into terminal there, and I used the option to boot into terminal already logged into user)

I can type “steamlink” and it runs. I then made a steamlink.sh to I can call to it in a cron job, chmod and executable all that good stuff, tested it manual, the script runs.

But instead of a python script and using the systemd method in that thread I went with crontab -e

(path was bad but I fixed that)

fist line is for the button I installed to give the pi and on/off feature
second actually starts up steam

Buuut, can’t be that smooth, running into a no audio issue like this post:
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=333417

So followed this guide’s reference of changing the display driver- in this person’s post they had a black screen, but in my case it fixed the no-audio

Token · December 19, 2023, 5:27pm

Got some thermal adhesive on the way (kinda wanted to use small 90 degree brackets with screws but meh, would need some kind of conductor anyhow so all in one seemed smart) cause the modem about to get a cooling upgrade

I noticed very early on in ownership the little OEM passive sink would get crazy hot so i took the cover off and just gravity plopped this large black one ontop of the OEM. Been overdue to cut the cover for fitment and adhesive the stacked setup.

Someone better and smarter would find some upgrade with OEM fitment or some 5v pin for a tiny noctua fan, but im not that guy.