FFmpeg has become my go-to tool for routine video file and stream manipulation tasks. The documentation for the ffmpeg command line utility is enormous, as one might expect for a really powerful tool. While there’s no shortage of example scripts in the ffmpeg official documentation, I’ve always appreciated short-form, “cookbook” style lists of example scripts for given use-cases. Here are some of my most commonly used ffmpeg scripts: View all …

When I was first getting my feet wet operating and developing on Linux systems, I used the popular terminal client PuTTY to connect to Linux systems. For a lot of folks with a Windows PC as their daily driver, PuTTY is the go-to tool for opening SSH sessions to Linux servers. PuTTY was comfortable for me for a while, until I found myself in situations where I needed to work …

In Parts 2 and 3 of the homelab build series I added HBA cards and a pair of Dell PowerVault DAS enclosures to the lab. And up to this point, all of the lab devices and components have been spilled out in the corner of my guest bedroom. I really needed to get everything out of the pile on the floor and into an enclosure of some kind. Fortunately I …

In my “Part 2” homelab build post I went over the process of selecting a HBA (host bus adapter) for my lab, then the process of installing and flashing firmware to the new HBAs. With the HBAs installed, both of my servers were now equipped to connect to the external storage. Now it was time to figure out what combination of storage enclosure and storage devices would be a good …

In part 1 of my homelab build series, I looked at the storage requirements for my homelab build project and began narrowing down possible choices for each type of storage device required in a vSAN cluster host. Up to this point I’d made a decision for two of the three devices I needed for each host in the cluster: Storage for the hypervisor OS (ESXi) Storage for the VSAN caching …

After I’d had a chance to get my hands on and evaluate the Supermicro E300-9D-4CN8TP Superservers, it became clear pretty quickly that these servers would work nicely as hosts for my new lab. They were compatible with all of the requirements I’d laid out when I began work on this project, which were for the new lab environment to: 1.) Have enough resources to carry all of my personal development …

First off—hello and thank you for visiting my blog :-). Right now I’m in the process of reviewing all of my notes and code related to personal projects I’ve worked on going back roughly three or four years. My hope is to be able to convert some of that documentation into content for this blog, so stay tuned. For now, I want to begin with my last big homelab upgrade …