State of the Network: 2023

Welcome to AASullivan.com! I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, so here it is: The State of My Network. I’ve been planning to do an overview of my entire set up for some time now and I’ve finally kept everything in a consistent state now for a few months after many years of …

Battery backups: maintaining access when there’s no power

A little background: Some years back I learned a very hard lesson about losing power on a RAID array that didn’t have an onboard battery backup. The result was ~7TB of data gone, about 1.5TB completely irreplaceable including old school work and photos. This was a hard pill to swallow and helped me get better …

Raspberry Pi offline Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a vast archive of knowledge and information we tend to forget is there. An encyclopedia of knowledge brought by users and edited by a community, it has a high accuracy rate and information on just about any subject you could want. You can also download an entire archive of it at around 90GB …

Project: NAS backups share using Windows/Backblaze personal

There’s two types of people: Those who have backups, and those who will lose data. Several years ago I had a raid card failure on a RAID 5 array (three disks) that lost about 5~ TB of data. Of this, about 1.5 was completely irreplaceable data, things as far back as high school projects. After …

unRAID: capacity and ease of use over performance

I’ve been looking over various NAS (Network-Attached-Storage) operating systems for some time now. Naturally, there’s two big players in the game that everyone seems to go to: FreeNAS and unRAID. Both boast a considerable user base, community add on support and a ton of customization but one big difference at a quick glance: FreeNAS, as …

Automated Youtube Downloads Into Plex (Windows)

Welcome to another Overly Complicate Project! This time, it started with some advice from our friends at r/DataHoarder and a fun tool called “youtube-dl”. This has taken a bit of tinkering and some custom code, but I now have an all-in-one solution that downloads Youtube videos from a playlist/channel, confirms progress to save bandwidth on …