raspberry pi

hardware services

How to Watch Movies on a Raspberry Pi

You probably have a nice media collection on your server: .mkv files, .mp3 files, .jpgs, playlists and you’ve been looking for a way to organize them and enjoy them. Enter KODI, the multi-media player. KODI is a great way to view all your media files. With a little bit of reorganization, planning, and installing, you […]

Read More
services

Central KODI Media Database

Once you start using KODI as your home theater system, you’re going to realize how cool it is and you’re going to set up more Raspberry Pis for each TV in the house! For sake of consistency, you’re going to ask yourself, How can I share my media library with all the Raspberrys?!?! There’s a […]

Read More
services

How to Play Steam Games on Raspberry Pi

I’ve got a big, fancy gaming computer to run my Steam and Steam VR games in my bedroom. Sometimes it’s nice to relax on the couch in the family room and play Stardew Valley. Buy another computer? Nah! I’ve got my Raspberry! Steam offers a product for LINUX called “Stream”. They’ve even created a version […]

Read More
hardware usb

How to Boot from USB for Ubuntu 20.04

When trying to set up my Argon One cased Raspberry to boot from the USB attached M.2 drive, I ran into a little snag! I set up the Raspberry to boot from Ubuntu 64 image on the USB drive, but after I copied the entire thumb drive to the m.2, I could not boot! Turns […]

Read More
hardware

UCTRONICS Ultimate Rack for Raspberry Pi 4

I wanted to get a couple of my Pis out of the experiment sandbox and permanently on the network. I’ve got a salt server, a pi-hole, a transmission server, and my cacti monitoring server. The configs are all backed up and they can be salted back to life but I didn’t want to run the […]

Read More
basics hardware usb

How to Boot a Raspberry PI 4 from Thumb Drive

So, it seems things have gotten easier with the new round of Raspberries. The Raspberry Pi 4 is capable of booting directly from USB. No longer do you need to build an SD card and then transfer everything to a thumb drive, edit cryptic boot files, and cross your fingers that you create an unbooting […]

Read More
Uncategorized

How to Install Zabbix Agent with Saltstack (or by hand)

If you’re using Zabbix to monitor your network, you’re going to need the Zabbix agent installed on each of your hosts. You could install the Zabbix-agent on each of your computers, which we’ll cover in detail, OR write a saltstack SLS file to install the Zabbix agent! So, first, let’s install the Zabbix agent by […]

Read More
hardware usb

How to Install an M.2 hard drive on a Raspberry Pi 4

Looking to remove one more speed bottleneck from your Raspberry Pi server? Me, too! That’s why I looked into SSD hard drive technology, specifically an M.2 drive, for my Raspberry Pi 4. The Pi4 has two USB3 sockets and I really wanted to take advantage of its interface speed. Those little blue sockets hold big […]

Read More
basics hardware raspbian

How to Use a USB Drive on a Raspberry PI

Sometimes you need a little extra legroom on a Raspberry. Just to store some files or maybe you’ve got an application that does a lot of reading and writing. You need to keep THAT kind of activity OFF of your SD card. SD cards will fail much more quickly if you have a lot of […]

Read More
services

Bulk Add Devices to cacti

It is really a hassle to add lots of devices to cacti when setting up a new monitoring server. Even using a template to make sure you consistently change the community string and device type, adding new devices to cacti gets old, fast. Automating cacti But there is a better way. There is a script […]

Read More