Fedora & Debian Photo Album Kiosk

November 7, 2024 - 5 mins read

I previously posted about setting up a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian 11 as a photo album kiosk. Since then I wanted to test completing the same setup with Debian and Fedora on an x86 machine, just in case my Raspberry Pi died, or if I decided I needed a faster machine and wanted to use my spare Beelink S12. This a great setup if you have a spare machine and monitor lying around for displaying family photos (again, see previously post to see my example).

Beelink Mini S12 Faulty Network

September 27, 2024 - 3 mins read

I recently purchased a second Beelink mini S12; mainly because it was such a good deal for $140 USD that I couldn’t pass up. The difference in this model versus the S12 Pro I had purchased for my Jellyfin server (see previous post), is that the S12 Pro is an Intel N100 while the S12 is an Intel N95. Well, it is true that you get what you pay for. The S12 (N95) has a bad wired network interface.

Home Server Monitoring with Cockpit and Landscape

September 18, 2024 - 4 mins read

Server monitoring has many levels. From my own personal experience, in the I.T. world as a Systems Administrator, I have used many products for such purposes (e.g. SolarWinds). You can monitor servers for simply their availability status. Or, you can get as detailed as monitoring performance and resource statistics. On my home network, I have tried many solutions from Nagios to Zabbix to Checkmk. All have been solid solutions but, truthfully, a bit of overkill.

rclone Google Drive Cloud Backup

July 23, 2024 - 3 mins read

In my backup strategy I have a few tiers of backup for restore scenarios. I have my primary data folder that syncs to my Nextcloud server on my home network using the Nextcloud client. This is so I can sync that same data to multiple devices on my LAN, even while I am off my LAN using my Tailscale network. That Nextcloud instance has a NFS share mounted from my 8TB Synology NAS (one of these days I’ll post about my Nextcloud setup).

Jellyfin and the Beelink Mini S12 Pro

June 14, 2024 - 3 mins read

I believe I may have mentioned (but don’t fully recall) in a previous post that I was a Plex user for many years. I had it running on my Intel NUC running CentOS then to AlmaLinux then to Red Hat and it worked well without any issues. For the past couple of years or so, I haven’t been happy with the direction Plex has been moving, like requiring a “cloud” account in order to view my own local media.

New PC Build

May 23, 2024 - 6 mins read

Finally, after using the same PC build for 9 years, I have built a new desktop PC. Thanks to the community members over at Tom’s Hardware forum, I puchased the parts from this list (as of 05/2024): https://pcpartpicker.com/user/t3kg33k_og/saved/#view=zpXWrH Even though I am an avid Linux fan, I had no choice but to install Windows 11 because there is one game that I play regulary (when I have the time), and have played for a very long time, that will not work in Steam’s ProtonDB is Insurgency: Sandstorm due to the anti-cheat software it uses is only compatible in Windows.

Minisforum NAB5 New VM Host

April 15, 2024 - 4 mins read

I found such a good deal on a new computer a few weeks ago that I had to pull the trigger. I had been shopping for an inexpensive mini-PC that I could setup as a new KVM/libvirt virtual machine host to replace my Intel NUC and found the Minisforum Venus Series NAB5 on Newegg on sale for 359 dollars USD. Normally, I purchase used computers on Ebay, most of the time for under 200 dollars USD; the two Lenovo ThinkCentre M700 you see in the diagram below I purchased for less than 100 dollars USD (my leon machine had some roles at one time but have been migrated to other servers).

Ghost Blogging Busting

April 1, 2024 - 2 mins read

News

I moved from Ghost blogging plaform self-hosted on one of my servers at home using a Docker compose file to the simplified use of a static site generator that is Hugo. There was quite a bit of a learning curve being that I am not a developer but YouTube and other resources on the internet were instrumental in helping me set everything up. Now, I just have Hugo installed on my Fedora workstation and a RHEL 8 web server for posting all the files that Hugo generates.

This Site's RSS feed

March 21, 2024 - 1 min read

News

I just discovered the Ghost CMS (this blogging platform) automatically comes with an rss feed to plug into your favorite feed reader. Here it is: https://www.androidsdream.net/rss/ EDIT - 04/01/2024: Since moving from Ghost to Hugo, this site’s rss link is different now than from what it used to be on Ghost. You can now find an icon in the left panel for the link.

Server Install Post-Configuration

March 20, 2024 - 6 mins read

As mentioned in last post when I complete a server install of either Red Hat or AlmaLinux, I have a post install shell script that completes some configuration setups. Hopefully someday I will get to writing an Ansible playbook to complete the same steps instead of using the shell script. I already have an Ansible playbook that configures my Fedora desktop and laptop when I complete a fresh install (I’ll share in a later post) so it’s just a matter of completing some of the same steps in the server Ansible playbook.