Small servers, home networks and the occasional dead battery.

• Swapping the battery in an old line-interactive UPS

  2026-09-14

  The little UPS under the desk started beeping every few minutes last week. The self-test said the battery was fine; the runtime estimate said otherwise. Four…

• A quiet NTP server for the flat

  2026-05-02

  Every device in the flat used to talk to a different pool server. Not a problem as such, but it made log correlation annoying: two machines a few hundred…

• Notes on scrub schedules for a two-disk mirror

  2025-11-20

  A monthly scrub is the usual advice and it is fine for a mirror of two 4 TB disks. The scrub takes about five hours here and I would rather it did not overlap…

• Moving the photo archive off the cloud

  2025-03-08

  Twelve years of family photos lived in a consumer cloud folder. Exporting them was the easy part; the hard part was deciding what the new home should look like…