Given the current ridiculous prices on all things computer, I’ve been shifting some things around internally to make better use of certain components, namely SSD storage. Because storage had gotten incredibly cheap over the years, I’m very fortunate to have an abundance of 1 TB SSDs and multiple high-density spinning drives. Now that you’d need to take out a bank loan to build a desktop, if you’re able to even find components to buy thanks to shitty AI companies buying up everything, I figure it makes some sense to look at how I’m using the components I have.
Sometimes life gets away from you and, well, you don’t perform the maintenance on your homelab that you really should have. It’s been an… interesting few years and I had a couple of Proxmox nodes that were a tiny bit, um… outdated. To get a quick idea of what you’re in for, we’re going from Proxmox version 7 on Debian 11, to Proxmox version 8 on Debian 12, to Proxmox version 9 on Debian 13.
I’ve been using Zoneminder for my home security cameras for about 10 years now, and I think it’s time for a change. Zoneminder has always been pretty stable for me, but lately it’s been causing a lot of problems that I don’t have the time or the energy to deal with anymore.
I was recently doing some reorganizing on my files, and in doing so I renamed a directory that then caused a couple of hundred symlinks to break. I needed a solution to find the broken symlinks and update them to use the new file path.
If you’ve followed my previous tutorials on Creating a Ubuntu UEFI boot USB and Creating a Bootable Windows 10 UEFI USB Drive Using Linux, you’ll understand how easy it is to create UEFI USB boot drives for modern UEFI based systems. But what if we have an older system that isn’t UEFI based? It’s still pretty easy to create a bootable USB drive, the process is just a little different.
In a previous post on Using a Raspberry Pi For Digital Signage, I mentioned that I was using my Raspberry Pi as a display for viewing the cameras for my Zoneminder system. Since I didn’t want to put a plaintext password into a script, I was wondering if there was some other solution I could use to have the script pass the login information to the Zoneminder server. As it turns out, Zoneminder has this feature built-in!.
I have a surveillance camera system using four (cheaper) wireless cameras and Zoneminder to monitor and record events. I’ll discuss this setup in more detail in a future post. For now though, I want to describe how I set up a spare Raspberry Pi as a viewer for the four cameras. This is just loading the URL for the “montage view” in Zoneminder, which let’s you see all your cameras arranged in a grid.