September 2014

Lacie 2Big NAS



I purchased a Lacie 2Big NAS to act as backup storage - it was quiet and nicely designed - it fitted into a home environment. Unfortunately, the device only offered email notifications of failure - which didn’t fit well against my Nagios based monitoring approach. A bit of protocol reverse engineering and studying their released sources resulted in a Nagios plugin that could monitor the NAS’s health.

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FSCK instructions for Rasperry Pi

It is trivially easy to shut your Pi down incorrectly and it still seems that this has not been addressed well in the Raspberian repository. Here is a summary of http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=64843 which describes how to fix the dreaded:

FAT-fs (mmcblk0p1): Volume was not properly unmounted. Some data may be corrupt. Please run fsck.



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Tronixlabs DS321 hardware clock config for Rasperberry Pi

For various reasons I need to make a Raspberry Pi into an NTP time server and for this to work I need time to be roughly right when it starts. hence we need to add an RTC to the Raspberry Pi running Raspberian.



Tronixlabs supplies a very nice module (http://tronixlabs.com/raspberry-pi/real-time-clock/ds321-real-time-clock-module-for-raspberry-pi/) but the instructions are a little less than optimal.


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