If you want to continue working on kernel development while on a staycation or traveling for other reasons, you need to securely access your home lab. After considering several open source solutions including WireGuard, I have settled down to use Tailscale VPN for my home lab. It is simple, fast and easy to maintain. Most…
Home lab : simple remote PDU for kernel lab machines
One of must-have features needed in a Linux kernel (or other system SW) development lab is the ability remotely power cycle lab machines. During bring-up of new kernels or while running tests, if the system hangs, test automation need to time-out the test and power cycle the system to programmatically to move to the next…
RISC-V: Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora Linux on VisionFive 2
In this post, I will share how I brought up and ran three different RISC-V Linux distributions – Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora, on the Starfive VisionFive 2 system I built earlier. There is already plenty of documentation on running various linux distros on VF2. I will focus on specific tweaks I needed to do and…
A Tinkerer’s Guide to Buying Electronic Components in Bangalore
In this post, I share information about various sources, both online and offline, from where I source electronic components for my home lab. I have been tinkering and building things at home for decades – from arduino based systems to rack-mounted 2U servers. Often, people ask me about sources of various components used in my…
RISC-V : Unboxing and Setting Up VisionFive 2 Developer Board
Starfive VisionFive 2 is a RISC-V based developer board (SBC) that was crowd-funded and released late in 2022. It uses a quad-core RISC-V CPU along with various configurations of DDR4 memory and I/O devices. This year, besides debian, ubuntu and fedora have announced support for the board. In this post, I share my experience of…
Home Lab – Implementing Linux Infrastructure Services
To get things going, I have implemented two Linux infrastructure services in the lab – serial console and PXE service. The serial console service allows me to connect to the serial port of any of the systems in the lab rack. PXE services provides PXE boot capabilities, for now only Fedora installation over network. Serial…
Home Lab Linux Systems – AMD
While used AMD processor based servers are available in the market, power requirements for those servers make them unsuitable for my home Linux development lab. Apart from airconditioning, there is also the provision for an electric car charger that needs to be accommodated. So, I opted for a lower power rack mounted AMD processor based…
Home Lab Linux Systems – ARM
Easiest ARM 64-bit developer boards to get hold of and integrate are the Raspberry Pis, so I used 4 of them in a 1U cluster to provide both Linux kernel development lab machines as well as infrastructure like terminal server and test servers. In this cluster I have two infrastructure servers (Raspberry Pi 3)and 2…
Rack & Accessories for Linux Kernel Development Lab
After enjoying the benefits of having a full-fledged hardware lab for Linux development at work, it became apparent that I needed to build at least some of the capabilities of a systems development lab at home. In a series of posts, I am sharing what I built, how I sourced different components and how I…
Hello world! Linux, Open Source and More
Welcome to Chronicles of Technology in Suburbia. I have created a separate technology journal with the intention of sharing bits of my experiences in tinkering with technology (Linux, open source firmware, open source systems management, computer hardware) as well as occasional opinions on such topics. I plan to write regularly about technology topics in this…