Server Central

Homelab Basics - PiHole Hello there! Ever hear the term PiHole on any subreddits that you frequent, but wondered what it was? Want to block ads on all your devices? Well PiHole is the solution for you! Read on for how to install PiHole, what you need to install it, and why you would want it. What you need A computer with the following specs -1 Core CPU 1Ghz+ -512mb RAM -52MB Storage+ As you can see, PiHole isnt a very demanding program. It is named after the Raspberry Pi, a low powered computer to host small programs. For this reason, we will be using it as a very tiny VM in my DL360 G6 . What it does PiHole blocks DNS requests from URLs that you provide. This can be used as a content blocker if you have kids to block mature content, or used to block ads. It is mainly used to block ads from a list provided by you. I use it, as do many other homelabbers. It is very versatile, and can be deployed in a number of network configurations. How to set it up So as you guys k

Gaming Off A NAS? - The Ultimate LAN Party Hello there! Today I will show you one of my "how has no one thought of this yet" ideas. Gaming off of a NAS. The ultimate goal is to play my Steam games off of my DL360 G6's storage. If you want to know the exact specs of the server that is hosting this beast, check out my Whats In Your Lab . The Problem Steam does not play nice with mounted network drives. At all. I thought this would be as easy as oh, just map the network drive and play, but steam actually crashed when I tried that, but persistence is key and after 3 attempts the drive finally mounted. After this problem was solved, I got really, really bad download speeds. Absolutely terrible. In the area of 0.5-1MB/s. This is unusual because I normally get around 10MB/s. I couldn't find a fix to this problem, so I just locally downloaded the games and then transferred them to the NAS. Another big problem was the disk was inconsistently being spun up and spun d

Running Doom on a TI-84/83 Calculator Hello there! Today I am writing this post as an exploration into the unknown: running a video game on a computer that hasn't been updated in the last 10 years. Of course, we cant run Crysis at the highest settings, but we can fortunately run doom pretty easily. Requirements -TI-84/83 Calculator -15 Minutes -A Micro USB Type B Connector - Ti Connect Why? You might be wondering "Lohannes, why wouldnt you just emulate this on a RPi Zero W" or "Why would you even?" To that I say, why not? I already dropped $120 on the biggest scam since printers existed so why wouldn't I try to get my money's worth? How? This is the fun part. First, you will need to connect your shiny new calculator from 2004 to your computer using the included USB Mini Type-B connector. After that, you will need to install the  TI Connect Software . This is what you will use to install programs and apps onto your calculator. Fo

Hello there! Today we will be focusing on one of my favorite things that I have built so far, my CD/DVD ripping machine! The official github page for this code can be found  here Requirements A CD/DVD Drive (obviously) A CPU with at least 2 cores At least 2gb ram A 60gb or more HDD/SSD Ubuntu 18.04 LTS ISO At least one hour of your time The Build I am rocking a way overkill i7-2600 and 12gb of DDR3 ram in this build. I did this partly because it was the only computer I had laying around, and partly because it speeds up the trans-coding process. I can rip CDs in 5-10 minutes each, and they are in my PleX server within 1 minute of being ripped.You definitely want a desktop for this, and not a server. Desktops have the added availability for more disk drives. Talking about disk drives, you can run down to goodwill and buy up all of their disk drives or their computers. I happened to get my SATA 2 disk drives for $5 a piece. I am also currently in the process of getting a