Infrastructure

Alright, so we’re adding more sensors to the stack! I went with more Ecowitt sensors because they’ll just connect to the existing console and send data through the existing pipeline. Hardware I’m going to start with the WH57 lightning strike detector. I’ve selected this sensor to pair with an AQI sensor to build a home brew wildfire detection and alerting system. The lightning strike detector will detect strikes up to 25 miles out. The physical installation is easy and it comes with the mount and hardware necessary, just add batteries. ...

Today I’m going to set up my local weather station in my yard that will feed data to my database that stores the forecast data I’m pulling from NWS. NWS gives me projected future data, but I’m not able to see what’s happening in my yard, until now. Down the road, I’ll perform some analysis comparing forecast data to observed data which will be useful for future automation and machine learning. ...

Now that the NAS is back online and has the new pool created, I’m going to dive into creating some datasets and users. In the future, I’ll create any users or groups before I create any dataset that is owned by said user or group as it’s a bit less clunky than doing what I did here. Dataset Creation I’ll start with creating a dataset for general use from endpoints like my laptop or desktop. Think PDFs, text documents, spreadsheets kind of stuff. I’ll navigate to the Datasets tab in the TrueNAS GUI, select my main pool, then select Add Dataset. This dataset will be called “docs”, I’ll select multiprotocol for the Dataset Preset and enable both SMB and NFS so it will work with both Windows and Linux. SMB name is “docs” to match the dataset name. I’m not going to set a quota (quotas would be useful for multi-user use or if I had more limited storage, but it’s just me and I have plenty of space), and I’ll leave encryption as inherited. I’ll leave the other advanced options as the default, most of them inherit from the parent pool so that’s fine by me for now and for this dataset. ...

I built a custom box to run TrueNAS a while ago but took it offline because I wasn’t really using it. Now, I’ve got a reason to bring it back online: hosting services for my yard and irrigation project. The original setup was rushed, so I wanted a plan to safely bring it back online on the new network backbone. This article mentions some IP mismatch issues, I cover that in my Network Backbone post. ...

To start my home lab journey, I decided to rebuild my network from scratch with some equipment that would allow me a bit more control than most consumer grade stuff. I thought that would be a good place to start as it supports a lot of the things I’ll be doing down the road. Hardware I went with all Ubiquiti gear for ease of use as far as pushing changes is concerned. I’ve got one control plane, and any changes are automatically applied to whatever device needs the changes applied. ...