Monthly Archives: January 2015

Setting QNAP NAS to shutdown on UPS battery power

Over the last week my area has received a lot of electrical storms, the most recent of which knocked out the power for a split second causing the UPS to fail over to battery power which saved me losing what I was working on. I’ve had this UPS for a few years now and it’s definitely been worth every dollar and then some, if you don’t already have one I suggest you look into investing in one.

Earlier this year I purchased a QNAP TS-870 8 bay NAS which is plugged into the CyberPower UPS as I don’t want to risk data corruption should the power go out. However when the UPS failed over to battery on the most recent instance, it made me consider what would happen if the power went out while I was not at home to safely shut things down. I run the NAS 24/7 so if the power went out for an extended period of time while I was out or asleep the NAS would almost certainly drain the battery of the UPS then shut off without correctly shutting down.

As the majority of my data is now stored on the NAS this would be an unacceptable option, so I have instead configured the NAS to safely shutdown when it detects that the UPS is using its battery.

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Decreasing disk space in Windows Server 2012 R2

Previously I’ve covered how to increase disk space in Windows server, now we’ll be outlining how to do the opposite by shrinking the disk space for a virtual machine running Windows Server 2012 R2. Firstly we will be shrinking the file system within the operating system, and then shrinking the actual virtual disk afterwards to reclaim space.

As of Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V allows us to dynamically shrink and expand the size of our virtual hard disk while the virtual machine is still running, meaning that there is no down time. Prior to 2012 R2 you would have to shut down the virtual machine to complete the process, I’ll cover where that’s done later on in case you’re using a version prior to 2012 R2.

Shrinking the available disk space on a server may allow us to use the space elsewhere, perhaps on another virtual machine. Typically most provisioning nowadays is thinly provisioned where the virtual disks will only be the size of the data stored on them rather than wastefully statically assigning the total space of the disk, so this may not be very beneficial for you. With that in mind there are still times where you may want to shrink the available disk space on the server to prevent a user using it. For example a service provider may have a customer looking to downgrade their disk space and we would want to shrink their disk back so they do not use space they are no longer paying for.

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Windows Server Maintenance Checklist

Server maintenance needs to be performed regularly in order to ensure that your server will continue to run with minimal problems, while a lot of maintenance tasks are automated within the Windows operating system now there are still things that need to be checked and monitored regularly to ensure that Windows is running optimally. Below are steps that should be taken in order to maintain your servers.

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Linux Server Maintenance Checklist

Server maintenance needs to be performed regularly in order to ensure that your server will continue to run with minimal problems, while a lot of maintenance tasks are automated within the Linux operating system now there are still things that need to be checked and monitored regularly to ensure that Linux is running optimally. Below are steps that should be taken in order to maintain your servers.

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Raspberry Pi Heat Sinks – Temperature before and after

Raspberry Pi Heat Sinks

Raspberry Pi heat sinks – are these needed to keep things cool and running optimally or overkill? Two years ago I purchased a small 3 piece set of copper heat sinks from Ebay for my Raspberry Pi, I was intending to compare the temperature differences with and without them. This was inspired from the testing I did in my Raspberry Pi overclocking benchmarks however I just never got around to putting the heat sinks to use – until now!

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