Welcome to Matt's Blog!

This site is a collection of my miscellaneous projects, ideas and dabblings in the world of tech.

New posts will appear as and when I have the time to write them and on no particular schedule.

Recent Posts:

25 Dec 2022 | Downsizing
An attempt to reduce the electric bill
It has been a long time since I’ve written a blog post, and while I have a long list of things to write about, my time is unfortunately finite. Over the past couple of years I have been making an effort to reduce the heat, power usage and noise of my lab. A number of changes have happened and I intend to write separate posts about some of them with more detail. Hypervisors While the...
Read more...
11 Jun 2019 | A new NAS build
Building a new FreeNAS Server
As previously mentioned in a recent post I have a new NAS. While a HP Microserver with an externally ported SAS HBA card and a DIY JBOD enclosure worked for some time, I very quickly outgrew this solution. I run Emby, Sonarr and Radarr on my FreeNAS server too and was finding the limits of the CPU options available in the Microserver. With the storage I was running, 16GB of RAM was also becoming too...
Read more...
10 Jun 2019 | New Proxmox Cluster - Part 2
Building my new cluster - Installation and configuration
Installing Proxmox With my two new servers prepared I set about installing the latest version of Proxmox 5.4. I did the installation via the iDrac console over the network and it was very nice to be able to install the OS from my desk without needing to bother with pulling out a screen, keyboard and mouse. The installation of Proxmox is very straight forward and although it did not allow me to configure my desired...
Read more...
09 Jun 2019 | New Proxmox Cluster - Part 1
Building my new cluster - Decisions and Hardware
As mentioned a couple of posts ago I have a new Proxmox cluster that is intended to take over from the HP Microservers. Unfortunately this project has taken far longer than intended and since it’s inception things have changed in my homelab meaning that the Microservers will need to hang on a little longer for some specific tasks. I ran into various issues during this project but as it’s now mostly complete I think it’s...
Read more...