Eric D. Wertz

About a year ago I decided to finally put together an indoor garden / hydroponics system in my basement. Here are some pictures from when I first set it up. 

I build the whole table structure out of 2x4's and some old solid shelf pieces. The grow bed itself is about 2ftx3ft and about 1ft deep. The black plastic in the picture above was my first attempt at creating a waterproof basin, but it was also reused and had some holes in it so I ended up redoing the plastic with a brand new clear drop cloth. This survived the initial filling with water and hasn't broken yet. I purposefully over sized the pieces of wood that hold up the light so that I could adjust the height of the lights if needed.

Here's some pictures of a stand for a record player that I built a few months ago. I tried to do a waterfall design, where the grain pattern carries over between the edges. My cheap Harbor Freight table saw doesn't really have the accuracy to bevel cut the boards like I needed to, but the end result was close enough. 

For the finish I used a water based polyurethane. The pictures here were taken while it was still drying, the end result still has some gloss but I think another coat or two would have made it shinier. 

This server was down all weekend after I attempted reformatting the 60GB SSD to be a data storage drive and managed to break the boot process. Even though the operating system was moved to the RAID 1 MicroSD array, the bootloader was still on the SSD. Apparently this worked due to the SSD having a small EFI system partition at the beginning of it. When I had first got the thin client and went to repartition and format the drive for Linux, I left the EFI system partition intact but I never did anything with it, and everything worked without me having to do some special EFI setup so I had assumed that it wasn't actually necessary. After much messing around, it turns out that this wasn't the case.

Luckily I have a USB drive set up as a live rescue Linux install, so I was able to boot from that (even though it doesn't contain any EFI info) and attempt to figure out why the thin client wouldn't let me boot from any of the internal drives. Through the messing around I discovered that I actually can boot from the MicroSD cards (previously I had thought this wasn't the case) so I decided to update everything so that the system would no longer need the SSD to boot from. This should come in handy in the future when I replace the SSD with some regular hard disk storage drives.

After some digging around I ended up finding this post: https://blog.roberthallam.org/2020/05/psa-dell-wyse-3040-uses-fallback-efi-location/ which shed some light on the situation. Turns out you need to install the bootloader with EFI options set or else the system will refuse to boot. I think it worked from the SSD previously because even though I repartitioned the drive, I never actually blew away the data on the first partition, so the motherboard was able to read the information it needed from there and run the bootloader.