September 2026
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What Is My Roku Talking To?
I’ve been using Roku players for years. In fact, Roku is still the streaming device I recommend most often. They just work, and last many years before requiring replacement. I’m also one of those people who doesn’t connect his smart TVs to the Internet. Ever. That might sound contradictory, but there’s a practical reason for…
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PVE Backups vs. Proxmox Backup Server: Why I Use Both
When my home servers ran ESXi, Veeam (the Community edition for the server backups) kept the critical VMs protected, and did that extremely well. It is a product I’ve used at home and the office for almost the same amount of time. When I migrated the servers completely to Proxmox, I suddenly had two different…
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Why My Backup Targets Don’t Use RAID
I use RAID quite a bit in my home lab. My main servers have redundant storage, and I’ve used RAID-1 and RAID-10 for years. If a drive fails in one of my primary storage arrays, I don’t want the server or its storage disappearing while I wait for a replacement drive. My backup machines are…
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Cheap Backup Storage With Old Hardware
Hard drive prices have been going the wrong direction lately, which makes building large amounts of backup storage more expensive than it used to be. One place I haven’t spent much money, though, is on the computers that hold those backup drives. In fact, I currently have three backup machines built from computers that cost…
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Why I Buy Enterprise Drives for My Home Lab
I’ve purchased a lot of hard drives for my home lab over the years, and for quite a while now most of them have had two things in common: they’re enterprise drives, and they’re used. That combination probably sounds questionable to some people. Why put years-old drives pulled from somebody else’s server into machines holding…
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Viewing SMART data of SAS and SATA drives on my R720s from Proxmox using Smartmontools
I found a very useful trick to read SAS drive data when the disks are behind my Dell H710P RAID controller on my PowerEdge servers. Normally RAID controllers hide SMART/SCSI logs. But smartctl can tunnel through the controller. Step 1 — Install smartmontools on Proxmox. On your Proxmox host: Step 2 — List the drives…
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