Mouse’s Tank Road

The famous Mouse’s Tank Road at Valley of Fire State Park taken on a recent day trip from Las Vegas.

For this photo, due to the current lighting conditions at the time, I had to take a total of three exposures and merge them into one using Lightroom in order to capture all the detail in the shadows.

This post is part of a series from a recent trip to Las Vegas.

Pi-hole Now Requires Authentication for API endpoints

I have Pi-hole configured to send it’s statistics to Influx via Telegraf using [[inputs.http]] (thanks to Jorge de la Cruz) but noticed that after upgrading Pi-hole to the latest version, my Grafana dashboard stopped working. Turns out since I have my Pi-hole web interface password protected, I had to change my [[inputs.http]] file from

http://192.168.1.5/admin/api.php

to

http://192.168.1.5:8080/admin/api.php?summaryRaw&auth=TOKEN

since Pi-hole now requires a token for authentication. You can find your token under Settings->API/Web interface->Show API Token.

How to add a GPU to a Dell PowerEdge R330 Server and use it for Plex transcoding on a VM under ESXi

I am happy to announce that today I was able to successfully add a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to my Dell PowerEdge R330 server in order to use it for Plex transcoding on a VM under ESXi. After extensive research, I ended up settling on a NVIDIA Quadro P400 which can be found used for fairly cheap these days.

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How to lower fan speed on a Dell PowerEdge server after adding a 3rd party card

The goal of this post is to show you how to lower fan speed on a Dell Poweredge server after adding a 3rd party card.

Most Dell PowerEdge servers specially rack mounted versions usually don’t support GPUs so after trying and adding one as a test I was quick to discover that since it doesn’t recognize the card, iDRAC kicks up its fans in order to compensate for the possible extra heat generated by the new addition. As I discovered that the GPU performs to my satisfaction (even though not officially supported) I wanted to figure out a way to reduce the fan speeds back to the state prior to the addition but digging through iDRAC yielded no solution.

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