Homelab

Some of my posts assume that the user already has ESPHome installed, so I’m documenting how to install it here so I don’t have to repeat it everywhere. ...

Just got an Orange Pi 5. I couldn’t find a simple set of instructions on how to boot it off the M.2 NVMe slot, so I’m documenting it here. ...

I’ve been backing my homelab up with duplicacy (See Backing Up the Cluster Using Duplicacy), but I’m fed up with it returning a 0 exit code even if there’s a problem with the backup. This makes me have to do a lot of annoying rummaging through log output to be sure that a backup actually worked, so I decided to switch to restic. In this blog entry, I’m going to explain how to create a jail in TrueNAS, mount directories you want to back up into the jail, install restic, and how to use it to back up to Backblaze b2. ...

TL;DR - SMR drives can take thirteen to sixteen times as long to resilver in your ZFS raid than CMR drives. If they even succeed. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that Western Digital started using SMR technology in their WD-Red drives that are marketed toward SOHO and small business raid, without any warnings about the RAID performance implications. I got lucky when I bought my last batch of Reds, they were all CMR, but it was pure luck - I bought them based on Western Digital’s reputation and because I’ve seen multiple NAS vendors recommend WD-REDs in the past. ...

I wanted to set up a security camera outside, but I didn’t want to be dependent on an outside cloud service - if my internet goes out, I don’t want to lose my ability to record video. Wyze cameras are nice and cheap, and you can reflash them to support RTSP in addition to streaming to the Wyze cloud. ...