Using Uptime Kuma for Network Monitoring

Welcome back!

Today I’m looking into Uptime Kuma, a monitoring tool that in my eyes is perfect, simple and intuitive and does exactly what I need for monitoring my home network. What is Uptime Kuma? I’m glad you asked.

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Notes from installing Nextcloud on Ubuntu 22.04LTS

Today I set up another Nextcloud server after taking the former one offline due to the size of backups for it getting a little out of hand. This also allows me to run the latest current version of Ubuntu Server (22.04LTS).

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Building a non-logging, encrypted DNS server

Welcome back! Today I’m working on a project to secure my web surfing to be an anonymous as possible using a combination of a software package called “Pi-Hole” and a VPN provider.

So, let’s start at the basics: VPN and DNS

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Apache issues when upgrading from 20.04LTS >> 22.04LTS

Been a while since I posted! I recently began an upgrade project for my Linux virtual machines which ranged from 14.04 to 17.04. The goal was to get everything on 22.04LTS. One of the issues I ran into (3 times so far) is with Apache not working:

apache2: Syntax error on line 146 of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf: Syntax error on line 3 of /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php7.4.load: Cannot load /usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp7.4.so

After some google searching, I came across the below fix which hopefully helps others too:

#Disable old php 7.4
sudo a2dismod php7.4

#Enable php 8.1 
sudo a2enmod php8.1

#Bounce Apache
systemctl restart apache2

This has worked on three systems so far all moving from 20.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS. Hopefully someone else finds this helpful!

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 about redundant backups and another thing that was especially important: UPS backups, or Uninterruptible Power Supplies.

A UPS is a device which provides power for a short time during a home or business power failure by providing an AC output to whatever is plugged into it. I have several of these scattered throughout my home, including for my desktop and a couple lights around the house which act as emergency lighting using older, smaller UPS devices. My servers are always running UPS backups, but on a big larger scale.

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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 at the time of this writing!

I’ve had the idea for a while now about making an offline version to run locally for myself or friends, maybe something just to browse during a flight or roadtrip. Or, as my prepping thoughts say, maybe something for when the power’s out and easy to access! Enter the Raspberry Pi, a low cost and low power computer to run this using a suite of tools you can run off a battery pack and access from one’s phone/tablet/computer. Well, this is easier than you might think! I’ll be going over the ideas and thought processes of this at a high level as the project took some time. I can provide more details if you’d like by reaching out to me at if you’d like.

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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 this, I went into backup mode and always had redundant copies both locally and online (cloud based). At this point I’ve made a pretty solid system for handling this across multiple systems. Lemme walk you through it.

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RG350P Handheld First Impressions

After saving up for this handheld, I pulled the trigger on this recently and have been pretty impressed overall. The system runs buttery smooth, comes preconfigured with a large number of emulators and ROMs and just generally feels like a solid little handheld from the hay-day of Gameboy goodness.

Running at 100 bucks with a micro-SD card, the system isn’t super expensive when compared to my Nintendo DS with a custom Kart to run roms (about 90 bucks total and much more limited in what it can do in comparison). This handheld even plays PSX roms without issue and has excellent loading times when compared to my playing times as a child.

Things of note:

  • Quick to boot. Plays games very well once you find the right roms. Surprised it plays PSX roms as well as it does (Vigilante 8, Driver, Crash Team Racing each for 30 mins or more without issue).
  • The system will randomly not boot (stuck on black screen) but hitting the reset button immediately resets and fixes it.
  • Came with 32GB MicroSD card loaded with ROMS which makes managing them much easier. Comes with a bunch of emulators (including DOSBOX which is neat) and all are preconfigured and just work which is excellent.
  • Lots of menu options that make it pretty solid to use. Can also save game states to come back to them if the games don’t support saving (very neat feature).
  • Worth 100 bucks? I’d say so for sure, especially with the loaded SD card.

I’m going to be spending a lot of time tinkering with this. It appears it supports networking (guessing via one of the two USB-C ports) so will need to check that out for easier ROM management off my internal SFTP server. In the meantime, I’ll be reliving my childhood on a 4 inch screen.