0The search for a 12 bay 5.25″ full tower case

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

I have an ori­gin­al Cool­er­Mas­ter Stack­er case (STC-T01-UW) that I use for my serv­er. It is great because it has 12 5.25″ extern­al drive bays. Strictly speak­ing it has 11 useable as 1 of them is taken up by the power but­ton and front-usb mod­ule, but this can be mod­i­fied if necesary. This spec­tac­u­lar case is great for fit­ting lots of HDDs for a stor­age array. My sys­tem cur­rently has 10 reg­u­lar size HDDs and 2 SSDs in it which fit eas­ily with plenty of cool­ing. As I want to build a second serv­er to migrate the older drives into I am look­ing for anoth­er case with equally impress­ive capa­city…
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0nginx curves error SSL_CTX_set1_curves_list

Published by & filed under Web Technologies.

I recently ran into an error with a new nginx con­fig that I could­n’t find any­where on google! Turns out that was because I was read­ing the font wrongly and sub­stitued a lower case L for a num­ber 1. So if you ended up on this psage because you searched for SSL_CTX_setl_curves_list then try search­ing again, for SSL_CTX_set1_curves_list.
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0Centos 8

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

Cen­tos 8 has finally been released and will even­tu­ally provide the base for a new host­ing plat­form for us. How­ever it isn’t quite ready as there are a few pack­ages not yet avail­able.
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0Expanding smarthome on the cheap

Published by & filed under SmartHome & IoT. Last updated .

As I’ve writ­ten about before, I have begun to exper­i­ment with the world of smarthome devices, and cur­rently use a smartth­ings hub and a google home mini. So far these have just turned on lamps and oth­er “plugged in” devices via smart­plugs, but with more com­pat­ible devices at reas­on­able prices finally start­ing to appear I wanted to start doc­u­ment­ing more of what I’ve tried
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0windows 8 logoMore WDS errors solved

Published by & filed under Windows.

WDS really is quite an unfriendly sys­tem. Clunky, fiddly, and prone ot fail­ure without help­ful error inform­a­tion. After updat­ing some of my unat­ten­ded files I was no longer able to carry out unat­ten­ded install­a­tions, but have even­tu­ally solved the series of mis­lead­ing errors
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0windows 8 logoAdding drivers to windows 10 boot image on WDS on Server 2012 R2

Published by & filed under Windows.

I have enough PCs in the house that I set up a WDS serv­er to make it easi­er to rein­stall win­dows if any of them go wrong. They have a lot of dif­fer­ent hard­ware and so I needed to add some drivers to the boot image which is from a Win­dows 10 retail DVD. How­ever, I got an error when try­ing to add them because the ver­sion of DISM used by WDS on serv­er 2012 is older than the ver­sion required by Win­dows 10 images
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0Storage SpacesFree up disk space on Windows

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

Most PCs that I encounter have drives that are full. This was the case in the days of HDD, and with mod­ern SSD typ­ic­ally being smal­ler it is even worse. A full drive will slow your PC down, as well as the annoy­ance of run­ning out of space at a key moment. Here are a good range of ways of free­ing up space
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