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 […]

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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 […]

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October 12, 2022

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

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 a Cloudflare Tunnel, so I don't need to open any port like 443 on my firewall and use Authelia and OpenID as an identity provider to securely authenticate and […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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: […]

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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 […]

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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. […]

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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 🙂 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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