Category Archives: homelab

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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Ender 3 Cura Profile For Perfect Prints

Drippy Bucket 3d print

Over the years, I was fortunate enough to achieve a good calibration on my Ender 3 and since my Cura profile appears to be working well print after print, I’ve decided to share it so others can enjoy the same.

Click below to download the profiles.

You will find both a support and no support version. Please be aware that both profiles also include rafts.

Stop “sda: failed to get udev uid: Invalid argument” messages on Ubuntu (vmware)

I recently ran into an issue after deploying a new Ubuntu VM where the following message would spam my syslog server every 5 seconds:

sda: failed to get udev uid: Invalid argument
sda: failed to get sgio uid: No such file or directory

Turns out these are multipathd messages that VMware began reporting in the operating system a while back and the following resolution can safely be applied:

  1. Login to ESXi and locate the VM
  2. Click edit
  3. Under “VM Options”, locate “Advanced”
  4. Under “Configuration Parameters” click on “Edit Configuration”
  5. Click on “Add parameter” and a new empty field will populate
  6. Click on the new “key” field and input disk.EnableUUID
  7. Finally, click on the “value” field and input TRUE

Click Ok and save. Now you must shutdown the VM and start it back up in order for changes to take effect.

The messages should now stop appearing in the logs.

How To Create And Secure An Ubuntu Server 20.04 VM On ESXi 7.0

Introduction

In this guide I will show you how to create an Ubuntu Server 20.04 VM on ESXi 7.0 and setup basic security such as firewall and SSH key.

Download Ubuntu Server 20.04

Head over to the releases page and download the image. For this guide, we will be using the “64-bit PC (AMD64) server install image”.

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How To Fix Memcache \OC\Memcache\APCu not available for local cache – Nextcloud

Today I updated my self install of Nextcloud from version 22.2.3 to 23.0.0 and after the update I visited the status (Settings->Overview) page in order to see if there are any pending issues and saw the following warning:

    The database is missing some indexes. Due to the fact that adding indexes on big tables could take some time they were not added automatically. By running "occ db:add-missing-indices" those missing indexes could be added manually while the instance keeps running. Once the indexes are added queries to those tables are usually much faster.
        Missing index "fs_id_storage_size" in table "oc_filecache".
        Missing index "fs_storage_path_prefix" in table "oc_filecache".

Please double check the installation guides, and check for any errors or warnings in the log.

Check the security of your Nextcloud over our security scan

The error indicates that I can simply run “occ db:add-missing-indices” at the command line and the error should be resolved so I navigated to the occ directory and issued the command “sudo -u www-data php occ db:add-missing-indices” but received another error instead:

An unhandled exception has been thrown:
OCP\HintException: [0]: Memcache \OC\Memcache\APCu not available for local cache (Is the matching PHP module installed and enabled?)

Some research led to this github issue which suggested adding apc.enable_cli = 1 to the file apcu.ini located in /etc/php/7.4/mods-available (please note that your version of php may be different) which turns out, it solved the issue allowing me to successfully run sudo -u www-data php occ db:add-missing-indices again.

I now have a clean status page!

Nextcloud status page

Configure Tautulli To Send Real-Time Notifications To Pushover

I recently configured Tautulli to send notifications through Pushover for when there’s activity on my Plex server such as Play Start/Stop, Plex Server Status etc. and works fantastically well so I decided to write a quick guide on how to do it.

Sign up for Pushover

First sign up for an account at Pushover (just remember that after a trial period, there’s a one time fee of $5 USD) and login where you will be greeted with a page showing your User Key on the right side of the screen. Take note of this as you will need it later. Now towards the bottom of the page you should see Your Applications. Click on Create an Application/API Token. Give it a name, click on the checkbox and Create Application.

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