Let's Talk About Tech!

Background Since the lovely box is now created , let's see how we can improve the reporting. ThingSpeak and MATLAB cannot provide me with the relevant reporting - simply because I need time to learn how it works and honestly, I have something else in mind. I have a home automation platform at home called Domoticz, may be I can get something out of it !

Background Now that we have created a device to measure our solar production , it is the perfect timing to improve it. In the previous post, all the electronic components are exposed to the dust and anyone can potentially disconnect the components - intentionally or not. It would be nice to secure everything in a custom made enclosure !

Background With this article, I'm actually starting a new section on my blog : some electronic builds. I have solar panels on my roof since 2009 and this is a real benefit. I mean, not only the environment is happy, my wallet as well. Price of electricity these days are crazy and this is a relief to count on this extra "free" production. The problem is : my inverter is old and provides no means to see how my production looks like during the day. I can only check the production since they have been in production (I have a so called green meter). Plan is to create a cheap mean to measure and log the production.

Background Have you ever tried to restore a Microsoft Active Directory object ? Painful mmh ? I tried as well and did not found any suitable tool that can definitely nailed it correctly without having a massive corruption after couple of days. Then, I heard Rubrik was able to deal with that. This is about the right time to give it a try !

Background Last night, I was in my monthly upgrades process for my clusters. I was about to catch up with all the versions. I was about to start the last run of patches, so I ran the LCM inventory for the last time. Of course I was doing something else in parallel - LCM is so time consuming, you'd better parallel tasking. When I came back to the LCM inventory screen, I saw 6 pre-checks errors : Cassandra down, network down, connection timeout, .... Most scary : node removed from Metadata Ring.

Background In the previous episode about "using API and Wallbox", we have seen some interesting ways to interact with the charger. In this episode, the goal is to add some more practical examples. Indeed, if you are following my GitHub repo on this topic, I have added some functions for pausing, resuming the charging session as well as locking and unlocking the charger. Also, I can set the charging power to a certain number of Amps. Let's see this in action !

Background Two month ago, I got myself a PHEV (Plug In Hybrid Electric Vehicle) and of course, thinking at the future, I also installed a class-2 charger at home. The obvious choice to me was the Wallbox Pulsar Plus charger. Small form factor, easy to set up, affordable and reliable. Wallbox software offering is great : centralized statistics on their website, mobile app, ... everything. But, is there any API available ? ;)

Background When doing upgrade campaign, you need to go to each cluster to verify who's got what software version and then check the progress. Sometimes, it could be painful to collect that information, especially when you have a lot of clusters. I was wondering how this could automated, some obvious details can easy be obtained with "classic" API calls, but not everything. Challenge accepted!

Background I'm one of the many lucky early adopters of Nutanix and my first cluster is older than 7 years old now. Still in good condition and serving test VMs for years. This one was the proof of concept that leads the way to many other clusters. In good condition yes, until mid Jan when I discovered that I've lost one node out of 3 in that cluster!

Background Always wanted to give a try to a Nutanix examen but you cannot afford it ? (between $99 and $199). Your company does not want to pay for it ? There are discounts from time to time, but you need to prepare for the exam, they are not super easy (especially NCP/NCM...). Ok, I have a good news for you !

Background I think, like most of the 3D Printer guys, you have your printer in your basement. This is indeed a great place, but it means each time you are about to start a print, you have to go downstairs, start the power switch, and go back at your computer place and star the print. OctoPrint is easy to get remote access to the printer, but, what about controlling the power switch ?!?

Background We came to a point where unprotected VMs can be out of sight and we could potentially miss protection on some important object. We do not want to apply a default protection at the top level of our infrastructure to avoid any uncomfortable storage usage. So what ? It would be nice to have a script running on a cluster and check what are the unprotected VM and apply an SLA ... mmmh let me think...

Background I would like to automate the Nutanix AHV cluster addition on my Rubrik appliances. Either for testing purpose or for more general deployments. In order to achieve this, you need to perform couple of actions and clicks in the UI. But since the Rubrik UI is API-First, of course, that should be doable via API call ? Isn't it ? But why limiting this to only adding new Cluster ? Let's see...

Background Would it be nice to directly manipulate Google Drive as part of the OS File System ? Would it be nice to automate backups directly in the cloud ? Would it be nice to stop buying expensive external storage ? The idea is not to send a "all to cloud" message. But sometimes, this very handy to have quickly have access to some centralized storage. Well, I think so. But How ? Cloud Storage is object storage (S3 like), so each files are actually identified by a unique URL and a set of credentials granting or not certain rights. There is a way of course !

Background Sending REST API calls to the cluster is sometimes slow and not very efficient. I came across some interesting posts on that topic. It looks like while REST is getting all the results (even the one you are not interested with) it exist another query type that only returns what you are looking for. This is GraphQL. Let's have a look !

Background Yeah, I know, I should have written it down in a safe place, in a vault or so. But it happened. I've lost access to my Raspberry taking care of my hotspot and sending my various API calls to my Yamaha Amplifier . This is an issue since I need to adjust some settings !