2024 Network Revamp

This month's goal, is to update the network to provide isolation, and separation between LAN subnets, and my server subnets.

Aka, if I go unplug my rack of servers- The internet should remain unaffected for members in my household.

Windows 11 - Restore Old Context Menu

Want the old right-click context menu back?

Copy/paste the below script into an administrative command prompt. Thats it.

:: Set "Old" Explorer Context Menu as Default
reg add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /ve /f

:: Remove Explorer "Command Bar"
reg add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{d93ed569-3b3e-4bff-8355-3c44f6a52bb5}\InprocServer32" /f /ve

:: Restart Windows Explorer. (Applies the above settings without needing a reboot)
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
start explorer.exe

:: Empty Comment (Prevents you from having to press "enter" to execute the line to restart explorer.exe)

Surge Protection - Entire Home, Rack-Only, etc.

A few months back, I noticed one of my ESP32s, got smoked during a few nasty thunderstorms.

And- it got me thinking- what happens if a large surge hits my house?

Is, it going to smoke my fridge? My TV? How about my server rack full of expensive gear?

So- I went on a project to upgrade the surge protection for my house.

Proxmox - Install Home Assistant (Script)

Recently, I needed to spin up a HAOS VM for testing an integration I am developing.

I realized- most of the methods, either have multiple steps, and/or are not very transparent.

So- I created a script, which you can fully review, and copy/paste into your Proxmox system to fully install Home Assistant OS into a VM.

You only need to fill out your target storage and network bridge.

Vertiv rPDU - A reasonably priced, 120v, individually switched and metered PDU.

For years- I have been using a combination of Sonoff S31 Plugs and a Kasa HS300 Strip to monitor, and measure my power consumption.

This- allowed me to fully visualize my rack's power consumption, into a sankey diagram.

However- the form-factor of neither solution was ideal, and as my rack has become nearly full, I needed a better solution as PDUs filled with smart-plugs, isn't exactly ideal.

The issue is, there are not many 120v PDUs, for a 24U rack. As a matter of fact, there are not many zero-U PDUs at all for 24U racks.

But- I finally found an option, for a fully managed PDU, with INDIVIDUALLY metered and switched outlets, which CAN2 plug into a standard 120v outlet.

Synology Multipath SMB, and iSCSI

So... normally when you want faster networking, you can just upgrade to faster NICs (10g, 25, 40, 50, 100g.. etc...).

However, in the case of my Synology DS423+, you get, two 1G ethernet ports with no expansion.

You would think the best course of action, would be to leverage LACP- however that is NOT the case.

Enabling Multichannel can double the amount of bandwidth per client, where as LACP, depending on hashing, only gives benefit up to the performance of one port.

This post details how to enable multipath for SMB, and how to configure iSCSI on linux with multiple paths.

Proxmox - Solutions to random errors.

This- is a short post which details how to resolve a few random errors you may experience with proxmox.

This post is for you, IF, you are experiencing any of these errors:

  • "System booted in EFI-mode but 'grub-efi-amd64' meta-package not installed! Install 'grub-efi-amd64' to get updates."
  • "Couldn't find EFI system partition. It is recommended to mount it to /boot or /efi."
  • "/etc/kernel/proxmox-boot-uuids does not exist."

Detecting a weird packet loss issue.

So- I recently installed a Quad 100G Mikrotik CRS504-4XQ-IN Router into my lab recently and moved a few servers over to 100G NICs.

Around the time I did this- I also started experiencing tons of random, hard to pinpoint instances of latency across my network.

I validated flow-control was enabled for the network- and I checked various port counters to look for errors.

This- issue took me around a week or two to finally pinpoint.... this post- is going through a bit of the steps taken.

Proxmox - Setup Debian Cloud-Init Templates

This post documents the steps needed to create a minified debian cloud image template, which you can easily clone, and have a running VM in seconds with no configuration needed.

This includes common packages, ssh-keys, IP information.

The end result of this project is...

  1. You clone a template, and start it.
  2. The cloned VM automatically starts up, updates itself, and starts running, with common packages installed, and your ssh details pre-configured.
  3. A slimmed down distribution, without excess (My end result was a 400M image.)
  4. No need to edit the VM after cloning, other then adding CPU/RAM, or other hardware as needed.

Proxmox - Import OVA

A random thing I recently came across while testing out LibreNMS-

I discovered they have a published .ova, which I wanted to import into Proxmox. However, proxmox as of this post, does not have a easy option to support importing this.

This- is a quick post, containing the commands you need, to import the ova.

Removing a stripe from a zfs pool

In my quest to optimize on power usage, One of my servers has a zfs pool consisting of 4x 8T disks, in striped mirrors configuration.

For this particular pool, IOPs and performance is not needed. As well, I am using barely 10% of the available space in this particular pool.

So- I decided to remove a pair of disks, to save a miniscule amount of energy.