Mike Trello
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Rebuilding My Aging Plex Server: Linux Mint 19.3 to Mint 22.3
I have been running Plex for a long time. Like a lot of things in my home lab, the Plex server has been upgraded and modified over the years, but the underlying operating system hasn’t received nearly as much attention. It has just worked. My current Plex server is a virtual machine running Linux Mint…
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Why Everything in My Home Lab Is on a UPS
Way back at the dawn of time (late 90s), I lived in a duplex for a couple years. I’d purchased a new PC and monitor and thought all was going to be good. However, the new purchase would randomly power cycle, even when working on it. OS corruption followed. Reinstalling the factory OS a couple…
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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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Why I’m Still Running Dell PowerEdge R720s in 2026
My two Dell PowerEdge R720s are old. Really old. Dell introduced the R720 generation in 2012, which makes recommending one as a server in 2026 sound a little ridiculous. Yet I have two of them running 24/7 in my home lab, and I don’t currently have any plans to replace them. It’s not because they’re…
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My Dodeca
In 2023, the Dell T3500 Workstation I had been using since 2016 as my daily driver had become very limiting. I had been working full-time remotely since 2017, so having a geriatric machine I spent eight or more hours (usually many more) in front of daily was a liability to my sanity. I decided to…
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