pandapaws.blog

Back in 2022 I got myself what I though was gonna be a great little computer to run my homeserver stuff on.

I got a Gigabyte Brix GB-BRR7H-4800 with a Ryzen 7 4800U, 16 core with 64GB of DDR4 and a pretty fast NVME on it. I slapped Ubuntu on it and installed Home Assistant, Plex… you name it.

It was great for a whole two hours, then it froze. I went fishing and saw that one of the CPUs crashed just when it happened. It was not the same CPU every time but it wasn’t random either.

I spent some time debugging and messing around with power saving settings, updated BIOS… Tried everything to no avail. When I tried to get Gygabyte to take it back I was turned down with “we don’t officially support Linux”.

I gave up and got a so much better and stable Intel NUC, an Asus NUC11TNKi7. Swapped the memory and disk and I was off to the races.

A few months ago I moved to a single family home and started adding security cameras. I put Frigate at the center and my experience has been great, but my NUC was feeling the heat (literally and figuratively!) and since I re-discovered the Brix on the move I decided to give it another try.

I finally found a way to stop the crashes, it was buried deep in the Proxmox forums, on this reply from last year.

echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost

That’s… it… I can’t believe it worked. I added a systemd unit that runs on boot and disables CPU boost. It’s been running with 0 crashes for a week now.

I would not recommend anyone to buy this mini PC, or any other computer from Gigabyte at this point, but at least it didn’t go to e-waste.

I have a few local services that I access through subdomains configured in CloudFlare’s public DNS. This is pretty useful specially if you, like me, don’t want to run your own DNS server locally.

I expose a S3-like service publicly that I turn on/off when friends want to access so that means that when I access it I go through the Internet and back to my local network, less than optimal when moving big data packets.

I though about setting a second ingress there (this service runs on top of TrueNAS, in a single-node K3s cluster) but that’s another thing that I need to maintain and can break.

Luckily, I use an EdgeRouter X SPF so I can use that to overwrite DNS requests to specific domains. It works wonders, no more editing /etc/hosts for me.

This is my config. First, if you use DHCP, make sure that you set the router’s IP as DNS servers. I put 1.1.1.1 as second NS, in case this breaks.

# Enter configuration mode
configure 

# Up the cache size a bit
set service dns forwarding cache-size 250

# Set system DNS servers and use them
set system name-server 8.8.8.8
set system name-server 8.8.4.4
set service dns forwarding system

# Set your local adddresses
set service dns forwarding options address=/foo.bar.com/192.168.1.XXX

# Save and check
commit
save
exit

show dns forwarding nameservers
-----------------------------------------------
   Nameservers configured for DNS forwarding
-----------------------------------------------
8.8.8.8 available via 'optionally configured'
8.8.4.4 available via 'optionally configured'

And that’s it. Now when I do an aws s3 sync locally I go directly to my NAS instead of going through the Internet.

You can check out official docs on how to access the configuration console for EdgeOS on this link.