budding on

DDC MQTT

Priyatham — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What is DDC ?

I always wanted a way to switch between the display but couldn't find any easier way to switch. It was sad that I only looked into this in much deeper after buying a Samsung Odyssey g8 monitor. The monitor doesn't have an inbuilt KVM. Then I thought maybe an IR sensor on the TV can be used to control it. With the understanding of DDC, I researched, and it only works with the HDMI output and not the DisplayPorts.

Home assistant widget with three different inputs

This uses simpleddc library with python. MQTT is implemented on top of it. There are different endpoints giving out the status, and one queue for each of the inputs. All of which were determined using a software.

Code

How I made this lxc container inside my self hosted server is in this self host.

Shucking for ZFS in proxmox

Priyatham — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Why not SSD ?

SSDs are coming down in price but still not at the level to get something with 20+ TB in my budget yet. I wish they would.

I always like to compare cost per TB of memory and see If I can make do. Used hard drives are a good option but with current prices of Seagate external drives coming down to $10/TB it was no-brainer to just shuck it and then connect to my server. I found a 26 TB one for $250 which was great. So I promptly shucked it and connected it to the power supply and the SATA cable.

Unopened HDD connected for testing

File system to expand

I wanted something I can grow without backing it up all again, I wish to keep hoarding more data drives so having a flexible file format that I can connect and easily expand on rather than copy all of it over was the requirement. ZFS was extensively available and supported well in Proxmox which was the easier choice to go to.

The inner workings of ZFS are not that known to me, nothing a YouTube video can't explain. But I wanted to select a data format that support this as well. So upon more digging, I found datasets to be flexible and utilized it.

Opened HDD connected with adapter

Dataset

I needed to do a lot of research on ZFS, this article here gave me

SSD as a cache to HDD

I had 1 TB SSD that was my previous data storage and backup, since I got the new one, I wanted to use it as a cache for the big boy. It was extremely easy to add it as a cache, and it worked tirelessly to stream my Jellyfin media and Immich libraries.

~# zpool status

  pool: seagate-media
 state: ONLINE
status: Some supported and requested features are not enabled on the pool.
        The pool can still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Enable all features using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done,
        the pool may no longer be accessible by software that does not support
        the features. See zpool-features(7) for details.
  scan: scrub repaired 0B in 00:40:50 with 0 errors on Sun Oct 12 01:04:51 2025
config:

    NAME                                  STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    seagate-media                         ONLINE       0     0     0
      ata-ST26000DM000-3Y8103_ZXA0RPP4    ONLINE       0     0     0
    cache
      ata-Inland_SSD_1TB_IBMC20110011843  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Arc memory limit

As everyone realizes that ZFS needs lot of memory, I went into the config file to reduce it later on.

Why a Self Hosting Server

Priyatham — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cheap solution

This is the easiest way to do it, I used my old laptop after moving it to Debian from windows made it so much faster, I did not expect it to survive after the keyboard is not working properly.

RSS is the king

I didn't want any social media on my phone as much as possible. Although I wasn't part of the Google reader era. I liked the Flipboard app which wasn't RSS I think but subscribing to things I only wanted rather than recommendations that would keep me glued to the screen. That got me into researching into FreshRSS. The demo itself was fantastic and I liked how it was. But self-hosting it would be huge thing. I needed a domain yada-yada.

The laptop server itself on a stand

A way to host my portfolio

I wanted a portfolio, my piece of the internet. Being part of the community with the least amount of money i.e. a graduate student. I wanted something absolutely free. That got me into GitHub pages to start. The restrictions on github pages got me out of it, and the privacy element of giving it all away wasn't sitting right with me.

That's my beloved first server, a HP laptop on a stand, The power bricks are for a display and another laptop. The switch is a treat, it was flashed with an open source tasmota that connects to my home-assistant vm on proxmox.

With my server needing a lot of power and needing a general PC for myself, I found a fairly modern gaming pc from a high school kid moving to college and got it for 600 bucks. It has as an AM5 decent board with 12 GB VRAM. Sufficient and6 cores good enough for me, Threadripper would have been nicer but I couldn't resist this offer.

What to install on the PC was a huge mystery, I needed a Windows machine for some games and a little stability but also Linux to work and enjoy the ease. After a lot of search, landed on Proxmox, to easily migrate services if I got a better server. Having a windows vm was also nice. I already had a SSD with windows and plenty of games, plugged it right in and used it to create the VM with no other configurations needed which was nice.

Inside a gaming pc with LED lights showing the cooler fan and GPU

For my data backups and how I used ZFS, look into this (shucking Seagate for ZFS).

This is still in making, I will talk about Proxmox pretty soon.