Recently I was greatly frustated by the fact I couldn't remotely power up or shut down my RaidSonic Icy Box storage box. These consumer-level boxes are basically local control only, no WOL or any remote functionality.

I decided to change the situation. As a half-day project, I made a simple Raspberry Pi + relay control to add remote network-accessible control for my Icy Box IB-3640SU3. There are also security and privacy aspects involved that might interest you.

Home automation is a large field with many market products available. TinyForest is another home automation system, developed and designed from scratch for various target environments, written in Python 3 and ReactJS. In time writing this article, TinyForest core system is fully functional, and further improvements are planned. It adapts to multi-sensor and multi-device configurations, and can handle everything from irrigration and heating to light controls.

Have you ever got sick of mess in your Linux home folder(s)?

The mess is usually caused by countless random dotfiles, generated by multiple applications over time. In Unix world, these dotfiles are also known as hidden files or hidden folders.

The dotfile pollution issue exists due to three main reasons: non-standardization of dotfile locations in a home folder, the way software developers treat user home folder locations in their application code and, unlike system-wide application packages, user-specific application files are usually not centrally managed at all.

Do you have extra laptop RAM sticks lying around your house or workplace? Do you want to re-use them before throwing them into a trash bin? Well, there is a solution which might take your interest.

In the earlier post I mentioned noisy fan of my recently bought HP Procurve 2650 L3 Switch. Today, I have a solution to the problem.

Actually, noisy fans seem to be quite common in rack/server room targeted network devices (switches, routers). According to my observations, the problem covers Cisco Catalyst 2960-S switches, as well. This is a major problem if any of these switches are installed at otherwise silent office or school environments.

There are basically two methods to work around the noisy fan problem.

Need a remote control for your physical servers but WOL (Wake-On-Lan) doesn't fit to your plans? Exactly my case!

In a case of emergency, such as a server not responding, I must have ability to control power states of my remote servers. Basic solution in such case is to physically reboot the server computer. But how to do it without physical access, and without WOL?

Home lab? Yes, first steps taken! This has been in my mind for some time. Why? First for learning purposes but it has potential for more in the future. Home network lab is not a same thing than large corporate network with multiple inter-connected sites, but it is a good start, anyway!

Home lab gives me an opportunity to get my hands on real stuff to see a blink of the physical side of network planning, giving more perspective for the whole process rather than only playing with logical (or virtually simulated) network topologies in network simulation software.

One of the first goals for Fjordtek was setting up a basic cloud environment for clients to use. Security in mind, the network connections must be encrypted and trusted which is why self-signed certificates were out of question, not talking about plain HTTP connections.