Just a note that Michigan football was looking like they are back to rebuilding. But it may not take that long after all having defeated Ohio State and Alabama, both two years in a row. And it looks like the Detroit Lions will will make a run to the Super bowl again. Hopefully it will be their year.

Network Chuck made a video about the neat things you can do with Docker containers and one of those he listed was running client software from an organization called “Folding@Home”, or “Folding at Home”. “Folding” refers to running simulations of proteins in the research of Alzheimer’s, several types of Cancer, Parkinson’s Disease, just to name a small few. Labs from all over the country (world?) have a great need for computing power for their simulations.

I’m really liking Proxmox. A Type 1 Hypervisor installed on a Beelink mini-pc (Ryzen 9; 32GB DDR5 RAM; 1TB on an M.2). The 32 Gigs of RAM is going to be upgraded to 96GB this week. First thing I installed was Debian 12 desktop because, well, just because. I think all home labs need Debian 12 installed somewhere. I also created a VM running Linux Mint 22, the latest version that just came out.

Again, it’s been a while since my last post. This time I got my site certificate without a hitch. Before that, I moved my site off the Raspberry PI that was hosting it to a Linode cloud server. The difference is that it now has a real static IP address, whereas the PI needed port forwarding since we don’t have a business Comcast account. It cost only $5 a month and I get 1 CPU core, 1GB of RAM, and 25GB of storage - sweet.

Looks like it’s been a year and a half since I last posted. I went off-line when I tried, twice, to create an SSL using Creatbot. Wasn’t totally necessary except Google won’t give websites any ranking without a SSL certificate. An SSL, for anyone not knowing, is a third party encryption certificate that basically says “this site is safe to use”. It a requirement for websites passing sensitive information over the internet, such as credit card information.

Last September my wife and I adopted a six year old pug we named Barnabas (a.k.a. Barney) from a rescue in Youngstown Ohio. Barney originally came from a backyard breeder who surrendered him after he was no longer of any use. The rescue took him to the vet to be neutered with the plan for us to pick him up after his recovery from surgery. The idea was to give the him a clean break from his old life and start afresh.

An update to my previous post concerning my Pi-Rack: As mentioned in my recent previous post I have been expanding my Pi-Rack capabilities. The following picture is my current configuration. PI-Rack The Pi-Rack is basically my home server rack using Raspberry PIs as my servers. You can see from the picture that I have four PIs, one 3B and the rest 4Bs. From left to right: Pi #1 is my VPN Pi #2 is my web server which host this site Pi #3 is Pi-hole, a DNS / Ad block Pi #4 is my NAS (Network Attached Storage) or File Server The NAS PI has, next to it, two 1TB USB WD Passports drives in a Raid-1 configuration.

In a previous post, “Arch or not to Arch' I was able to manually install Arch and get it up and running except the wifi. On a laptop, that’s not good. So I gave up after a couple of weeks and put Manjaro on it, which is an Arch-type distro and called it good. Then I saw a youtube video by Brodie Robertson who installed Arch using an installer, something I didn’t know existed.

Michigan-42, Ohio State-27 Michigan State-30, Penn State-27 Pitt-31, Syracuse-14 Christmas came early

My PI-rack is almost complete. The final major PIece is my Network Attached Storage (NAS) powered by the mighty Raspberry PI 4B running Open-Media-Vault (OMV) configured as RAID-1. It took a long time to get here mainly because of the lack of availability of the Raspberry PIs due to the shipPIng problems throughout the country. I frequently check to see if anyone has them in stock and to my surprise the 4GB version was available so I snagged one.

Last Sunday the 27th Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church Michael Curry came to visit us at the little Church of the Atonement in Carnegie Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. The same one who delivered the homily of Prince Harry and Megan wedding, who also officiated at the funerals of Senator John McCain, President George H.W. Bush, and recently General Colin Powell. Bishop Curry giving his homily The Bishop with our own Reverend Benjamin Wright.

I wanted to say “By the way… I use Arch. But I can’t just yet. I’ve go a couple of old laptops that I experimented with and I decided to install Arch Linux on the Dell Latitude D620. The main reason was just to do it so I could say the BTW line. I thought Arch, being a very minimal distro would be perfect for an old laptop with limited speed.