In the last part of this series we checked-out and installed software for building our own voice assistant without leverage cloud resources. In this article we will focus on linking both Rhasspy and Node-RED. At the end, the assistant will learn it's first function.

Desired state

As we already know from the last …

Some months ago, I built a small VSAN home lab. Gradualy I expanded the setup - e.g. I moved from a hybrid setup (HDDs and SSDs) to all-flash (SSDs only) to utilize deduplication. Because errors might occur during testing, my NAS is still used as shared storage for the cluster.

The HDDs of my NAS were unable to meet …

2016 seems to be the year of big hardware renewals for me - after completely overhauling my virtual infrastructure, I also needed new hard drives for my NAS after nearly 4 years.

NAS, DAS, what?

For many years, I have been using D.I.Y. NAS servers for collecting my data and media library on a single host. After I was …

I was puzzled when I saw that the ESXi hosts of my new lab are generating critical CPU fan errors. Strange, I'm sure I mounted the fan correctly - otherwise the system would have been shutdown automatically to prevent serious damage. 🙂

I had a look at the IPMI web interface and saw that a fan is detected - but why is …

In 2008 I started working as VMware administrator and thus also began using vSphere at home. You might know this - as an IT person you want to have a lab at home that can be compared with the infrastructure at work. 🙂

The hardware half-life is quite short and especially when virtualizing workloads you can reach memory …

New HP Smart Array controllers built into a  HP Integrity machine are basically unconfigured. When running the EFI Shell, you will probably see the following message:

1HP Smart Array P800 Controller     (version 7.22)  0 Logical Drives
21785-Drive Array Not Configured
3     Run Smart Array Configuration Utility
4...
5 …

At about two years ago I replaced a lot of my hardware with more power-saving alternatives. My self-made NAS and hypervisor wer replaces by two HP ProLiant MicroServer G7 servers (N36L and N40L) - for a long time I was very happy with them.

In the last months the amount of VMs increased and now the CPU and memory …