Father, author, developer, maker. Please consider sponsoring my work.
Project MINI RACK - what have we started??
Today I set up a new DeskPi RackMate 12U model, the T2, and compared it to the other existing models (T0 / 4U and T1 / 8U)... and I have to ask: at what point are these racks not 'mini' anymore?
I posted a short video about the 12U in case you're interested in it—though many mini homelab enthusiasts have taken to 3D printing the entire rack, or just buying two cheap rack rails and using equipment to screw them together! (It's certainly easier to stomach $10 in parts for a DIY mini rack instead of paying $150+ for a premium mini rack like DeskPi's!)
…NUT on my Pi, so my servers don't die
A few weeks ago, power went out for the first time in my studio space, and that meant all my servers just had power cut with no safe shutdown.
Handling power outages is never a top priority... until it's the only priority! And by then it's usually too late! Luckily for me, no data was lost, and my servers all came back up safely.
This week the power company emailed and said they'd be cutting power for maintenance next week, but they don't have an exact time. So it's even more excuse to finally set up NUT on a Pi!
…Benchmarking multiple network interfaces at once in Linux with iperf3
Recently, I've been working on a Pi router build with multiple 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports using Radxa's Dual 2.5G Router HAT.
I wanted a simple way to check on total network TCP throughput using both interfaces (or really, as many interfaces as possible) to multiple computers on my network, and I noticed iperf3's --bind option (like --bind [ip address of interface]) was not splitting the traffic on both interfaces—it would just route all traffic through one!
SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 is a strange, powerful RISC-V board
SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 is a strange board. It's the fastest RISC-V development board I've tested—though I haven't tested a Milk-V Megrez. It's also Mini DTX, which is an ATX-adjacent standard board size that won't fit in many Mini ITX SFF PC cases, which might be why SiFive and ESWIN are releasing a custom case for it (pictured above, which they sent along with the board for my review).
…How to Recompile Linux (on a Raspberry Pi)
Because I get the same question on every video where I recompile the Linux kernel on a Pi to work on GPU or other hardware driver support, I finally made a video answering it:
How do you recompile Linux?
In my case, since I mostly rebuild the kernel for the Pi, I rebuild Raspberry Pi's Linux kernel fork instead of 'mainline' linux (the upstream Linux kernel source).
There are a couple great guides for recompiling Linux on the Pi:
…Build Box64 with Box32 for X86 emulation on RISC-V Linux
Recently I've been testing a SiFive HiFive Premier P550, and as part of that testing, I of course plugged in some AMD GPUs I had laying around.
I'll get to that testing at a later date, but one thing I enjoy in my testing is finding what 3D accelerated games and other applications can be run on alternative architectures. With the great work from Wine and Proton over the years, a great many games run out of the box on Linux—and they can be made to run on Arm and RISC-V architectures with almost as much ease as Linux on X86/AMD64!
…