Category Archives: Hardware

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 11 – extended monitoring with additional exporters
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10 February 2026

In the previous post FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 10 – monitoring with VictoriaMetrics and Grafana, we configured VictoriaMetrics, node_exporter, Grafana and created a basic dashboard and basic alerts. Now, I want to add a bit more monitoring – to see process CPU/RAM data, SMART information, and ZFS details. Everything written here has been added to… Read More »

MikroTik: First Look and Getting Started
4.5 (2)

24 January 2026

I had been thinking about trying MikroTik for a long time, but I was always a bit too lazy to delve into RouterOS. Finally, riding the wave of the Home NAS project setup (see the beginning in FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – setting up ZFS mirror), I decided it was time to upgrade my… Read More »

Arch Linux: “mysterious” DNS timeouts and “in search of the Ethernet truth”
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20 January 2026

For a couple of months now, my work laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 running Arch Linux, has been having trouble opening new websites – for the first 10-15 seconds, the site loads in “pieces”, for example: But then it “wakes up”, and everything starts working perfectly: Finally, when I started setting up a… Read More »

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 5 – ZFS pool, datasets, snapshots, and ZFS monitoring
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27 December 2025

Continuing the “for fun and profit” journey of setting up my home server with FreeBSD on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720s SFF. And today, finally, we will do the main part – set up a ZFS pool on real disks, look at working with datasets, encryption, snapshots, and monitoring. All posts in this blog series: FreeBSD:… Read More »

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
4.8 (5)

23 December 2025

I have an idea to set up a home NAS on FreeBSD. For this purpose, I bought a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720s SFF – it’s quiet, compact, and offers the possibility to install 2 SATA III SSDs plus a separate M.2 slot for an NVMe SSD. What is planned: on NVMe SSD: UFS and FreeBSD on… Read More »

FreeBSD: Installation on a ThinkPad X200 Tablet in 2025
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23 December 2025

I’ve been a ThinkPad fan for a long time; I really love their entire lineup. Recently, I came across the X200 model, which was manufactured starting in 2008 – I just saw a picture somewhere and really wanted it for my “collection.” Unexpectedly, it was even available for sale in Ukraine, so I bought this… Read More »

Kubernetes: find a directory with a mounted volume in a Pod on its host
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18 May 2025

We have an AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service with the VictoriaMetrics stack deployed (see VictoriaMetrics: deploying a Kubernetes monitoring stack). I need to migrate the data from the old VMSingle Pod to the new one on the new cluster, and to do this, I need to find VMSingle’s data on an EC2. Note: regarding the migration… Read More »

Arch Linux: mount LVM partitions and run mkinitcpio
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15 April 2025

It’s not often, but sometimes I need to boot the system from a USB and rebuild initramfs-linux.img. This post is more of a quick note to myself on how, what, and where to mount on my laptop to run mkinitcpio, as I have LVM partitions, separate disk partitions for /boot, and swap. iwctl and WiFi… Read More »

Networking: when there is no power – ZTE 4G modem + external antenna
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19 November 2022

What to do when there is no electricity, mobile communication towers are turned off, and you want to watch the outcasts with Ukrainian cats? That’s right – buy yourself a 3/4G modem with an antenna! In addition, the antenna itself does not need power, and the modem can be inserted into an ordinary power bank,… Read More »

Linux: saving laptop’s battery energy
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19 November 2022

This time it became interesting to me – is it possible to somehow save the charge of the laptop battery? Not to say that it discharges quickly, it is enough for 5-6 hours of work, but it will not be too much, especially with the current power outages in Ukraine. Found several utilities, and will… Read More »