March 26, 2023

Reset a self-hosted Unifi Controller on Ubuntu/Debian to factory defaults (without reinstalling)

Quick tip, if you want to start fresh on your self hosted Unifi Controller instance, there is a simple command to just purge and reset the database and settings to factory defaults. Just ssh into your Unifi Controller instance on Ubuntu or Debian and enter as superuser: No need to apt uninstall anything or do […]

Read more

December 1, 2022

Manual update Unifi Controller from 7.2.95 Java 8 to 7.3.76 Java 11 on Ubuntu server

Ubiquiti just released its new network controller version 7.3.76 and alongside with the major change of jumping from Java 8 to Java 11, the update had a lot of features and changes under the hood added. Unfortunately Ubiquiti did not release the new controller version via the official apt repositories. In the official patch notes […]

Read more

October 12, 2022

Setup Authelia v4.37.5 bare metal with OpenID and Cloudflare Tunnel on a hardened ProxMox LXC Ubuntu 22.04 LTS container

BEWARE: THIS GUIDE IS FOR AUTHELIA v4.37.5 OR EARLIER VERSIONS!Authelia introduced major changes that break your config in v4.38.x. So please be cautious with this guide until its updated! I was looking for a secure and reliable way to expose some of my homelab webinterfaces and APIs to the public. I decided to go for […]

Read more

April 17, 2022

Set multiple local IP address targets for pihole Local DNS record to support a multi cluster layout (like docker swarm or kubernetes)

If you are running multiple devices in a cluster layout, like docker swarm or kubernetes, you may have multiple IPs that could lead to the same service. And to make things easier you probably have set a local DNS record within your piHole to give the service an easier local domain name instead of remembering […]

Read more

April 13, 2022

Setup a self-hosted Unifi Controller on a hardened ProxMox LXC ubuntu container

Update hint: This guide installs via the official apt debian/ubuntu repositories, which does NOT have yet the actual controller version 7.3.76 including Java 11. If you want this new version, please follow after this install my update guide to the latest version here. With the latest release of Ubiquitis' Unifi consoles, the UXG-Pro, I am […]

Read more

March 21, 2022

Setup a scalable high availability GlusterFS network filesystem with Docker Swarm on Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS

In this quick guide we are going to setup the scalable GlusterFS filesystem for a four node Docker Swarm cluster on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. More precise: we replace an existing persistent NFS storage on the cluster with the new GlusterFS and make it available under the same old mount point as the old NFS. Therefore […]

Read more

January 28, 2022

How to backup your Unifi Dream Machine (Pro) config automatically with Synology or any other UNIX device

Most owners of a Unifi Dream Machine (Pro) know about the automatic backup feature Ubiquti offers in their UDM(P) interface. The feature creates automatic backups of all your config settings and stores it locally on the device. So you can manually download it from there before you change something. But what if you forgot about […]

Read more

December 22, 2021

Setup a WireGuard VPN on Unifi Dream Machine (UDM/UDM-Pro) and use MacOS as a client

WireGuard is quite a hyped new VPN server that has some pros why you would like to use it. Its part of the Linux kernel now and therefore you can setup a WireGuard VPN server on almost every piece of hardware. But some people might want to run it on their router, and if you […]

Read more

December 21, 2021

Install Home Assistant highly-available on Docker Swarm with influxDB, mariaDB and shared persistent NFS storage

Every SmartHome enthusiast loves Home Assistant. And so do I! But, with Home Assistant as your central brain and heart of your SmartHome, downtimes are nothing you want to have or run into. So I thought a lot about what would be the best, yet affordable, hardware setup to make Home Assistant as reliable as […]

Read more

October 25, 2021

Install Windows 11 on Proxmox 7.0-13 with TPM 2.0 chip emulation

This guide will show you how to easily virtualize the new Windows 11 on Proxmox 7 including TPM 2.0. 1. Download the ISOs: We need two ISO files: Windows 11: Go to Microsoft and download the official Windows 11 Installer ISO. virtIO drivers: Go to virtIO GitHub and download the latest ISO version there Once […]

Read more

August 31, 2021

Build a Raspberry Pi 4 Docker Swarm Cluster with four nodes and deploy Traefik with Portainer

I decided to run all of my supporting homelab services in a more flexible setup, making it easy to deploy and test new features, while also ensuring that already running and needed tasks are stable and constant available. Therefore I decided to create a four node Docker Swarm cluster with four Raspberry Pis 4 8GB […]

Read more

April 27, 2021

Create a pihole High Availability setup with 2 pihole instances on Proxmox and Gravity Sync

In this guide we will cover how to create a High Availability pihole setup with Gravity Sync, so next time one of your pihole is not reachable, your DNS requests are still resolving over the fallback pihole instance. Lets get started! Getting started: setup a second machine First, either create a second virtual machine if […]

Read more

December 5, 2020

Reroll and downgrade Proxmox Server Cluster after faulty upgrade

This is a quick tutorial about a case I recently encountered. After a upgrade of a clients Proxmox cluster to the latest version, two very important VMs were not able to power on again. As it turned out fixing the root of the issue would take much longer than the downtime would allow for, as […]

Read more

September 25, 2020

Proxmox 6.2-11 VM GPU PCIe passthrough for Windows 10 on AMD EPYC 7402P and ROMED8-2t

Its very important to keep the order of this guide and not add and setup things prior or later, as this will create errors. Also I tried to keep it as detailed as possible, therefore it is going to be a fairly long article. Use this index to quickly jump to the area you need: […]

Read more

September 20, 2020

Setup a Proxmox Two-Node High Availability Cluster with a RaspberryPi as a third Quorum vote device (qdevice)

In this tutorial we are creating a Proxmox cluster with two physical servers, node1 and node2, and we will add a RaspberryPi as a third Quorum device to make the Proxmox cluster working as intended in High Availability mode with having an odd number of cluster votes. This gives smaller business or a homelab user […]

Read more

September 12, 2020

Automatic backups for Proxmox Server Nodes to a Synology NFS share

Problem to solve: If you have a Proxmox Server and you like tinkering around with it like I do, then you probably know that feeling that all of a sudden nothing seems to be working as it used to be and you want to re-roll to a certain point and just start all over again. […]

Read more

September 4, 2020

Build a smart MagicMirror with two displays running on Raspberry Pi

This project was already build in 2015, but due to a recent reinstall of the MagicMirror software on my mirror, I decided to share the whole build including the up to date software setup process from scratch. Also I can tell that it ran flawless for the past 5 years now, so pretty stable 🙂 […]

Read more

August 23, 2020

Install pihole on a ProxMox LXC ubuntu container and setup as Primary DNS for a Unifi Network

Today we install the famous DNS advertisment blocker pihole in a LXC container on a Proxmox server, and set this as our network wide primary DNS server on the Unifi controller. The cool thing is that even as pihole was born as a Raspberry Pi project, it can easily run on most other Debian-based operating […]

Read more

August 14, 2020

Custom painted Unifi Network & Server Rack in IKEA Besta shelf

In the past years I started to switch most of the technology that runs at my home towards 19" rack sized devices. Biggest reason for this was to slowly build up and progress towards a full sized 19" rack that you would find in a single family house or a small business. So for me […]

Read more

July 27, 2020

Polish your Raspberry Pi: Clean boot, splash screen video, noconsole & ZRAM

In general the Raspberry Pi is great learning tool. One reason is the great default verbose boot and console messages you see when booting or shuting down your raspberry pi. But for some more polished projects, its quite handy to hide all of that and have a nice boot loading animation instead. In this instance […]

Read more

July 24, 2020

Quickly resize and shrink Raspberry Pi SD card image on MacOS

From time to time you may want to quickly copy a raspberry pi image from one system to another....but only have a smaller SD card. Or you started your project as a tryout on a crazy 64GB sd card, and realize later that 8GB would be way enough. So what you want to do, is […]

Read more

July 15, 2020

Raspberry Pi Photobooth in a classic vintage plate camera

I always wanted to have an old vintage plate camera from the early times of photography in my home as kind of a decor item. Inspired by walking across old flee markets in Germany, I thought it may be cool to put more into it, than just having the plate camera as a decoration item. […]

Read more

June 14, 2020

Install expressVPN with kill switch and jDownloader2 in a ProxMox LXC container

This install is similar to the install on Raspbian and a raspberry pi, still there are some specialities and traps you can run into, especially with the virtual architecture and openvpn service. If you want to install the same setup on a Raspberry Pi, please read my earlier guide on this topic. WARNING: the openvpn […]

Read more

May 31, 2020

Test your internet bandwidth on CLI or Terminal with python and speedtest.net

We all know this situation: you are on a fresh setup of Linux remote server or a headleas Raspberry Pi, and somehow the speed is not feeling right. Besides a iperf LAN speedtest for your device you can quickly check your connection speed to the outside with this handy python script command: If you don’t […]

Read more

May 31, 2020

Setup secure SSH to key only access with custom user/port on Raspbian/Ubuntu

This quick guide shows my standard routine for setting up secure SSH on new fresh installs of Raspbian or Ubuntu VMs. First if you are still using any system default user like "pi" or "root" or "admin", change this and create your own, custom user. Lets start in this example with our new user name […]

Read more

May 29, 2020

Build a PROXMOX virtual server on SuperMicro SuperServer 5018A-FTN4

Introduction Over the years I piled up a lot of different projects running in my home on different Raspberry Pis. Because this amazing little piece of technology can literally do anything, I love to tryout and build things with it. Roughly every third project turned out to be one I will keep running and so […]

Read more

March 30, 2020

Test real network speeds between clients/server with iperf3 and Synology

I exchanged my Synology server for a 10Gbit capable model, and after deploying it, I wanted to confirm the actual available speed over my network. For this matter I use the tool iperf3. It is a great command line interface (CLI) based tool, that supports all varieties of operating systems: from Windows over MacOS and […]

Read more

November 25, 2019

Raspberry Development Environment on MacOSX with QEMU

This is a quick guide on how to setup your Mac to mount and run Raspbian images for rapid rpi prototyping, testing and tinkering. It enables your Mac to start and simulate a Pi 3 and all its (web)services via the terminal. So you can start tinkering in no-time before deploying on a life rpi. […]

Read more

October 25, 2019

Pi VPN Box: Anonymous Raspbian with ExpressVPN and jDownloader

This is how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a powerful VPN box, that automatically connects to a VPN on boot and keeps itself connected by trying to reconnect when disconnected. If it gets disconnected from the VPN at one point we are ensuring that all traffic gets drop until we are back connected with […]

Read more

October 25, 2019

Raspbian update routine script

This is a little helper script that runs all the update commands of the Raspberry Pi in an order. Making it more comfortable to use and also possible to tie to a cronjob for automatic system update schedules. Lets start with creating the script file in our home dir: Paste the following script into the […]

Read more

October 21, 2019

Automatic backups for Raspberry Pis to a Synology NFS share

Problem to solve: If you have some Raspberry Pis at home and you like tinkering around with them like I do, then you probably know that feeling that all of a sudden nothing seems to be working as it used to be and you want to re-roll to a certain point and just start all […]

Read more

October 11, 2019

Install nodejs & npm on Raspberry Pi 2, 3 or 4

First update the Debian apt package repository to include the NodeSource packages: Now that we have added the NodeSource package repository, we can move on and install Node.js! After it finished validate install by typing: You should get a response like "$ 12.10.0". Now you are good to go to run npm.

Read more

April 14, 2019

Synology Web API PHP exploration and experimental dashboard

A couple of month ago I started exploring Synologys so far very undocumented WEB API. I basically started with the authentication and from there experimenting and researching on my own Synology DSM Webinterface. I found out, that a lot of the terminology and paths used in the WEB API are exactly the same as used […]

Read more