As a long-time user of high-quality video surveillance systems like Synology and Ubiquiti, I’ve grown accustomed to deploying and relying on their robust, feature-rich ecosystems. However, this time I was looking for something more affordable, focused solely on video management, without the overhead of NAS capabilities or other advanced features. I needed a lightweight solution that could run on a Raspberry Pi—and on Guillaume’s recommendation, I turned to Frigate. This open-source tool offers live video stream management, recording capabilities, and even optional AI-based video analysis. It looks promising and well-built. This post is, as usual, a log of my journey testing this setup in real-time. It’s also an excuse to finally experiment with a Raspberry Pi 5, which I’ve paired with an NVMe drive for video storage, avoiding the SD card’s limited endurance under heavy I/O workloads. I’ll admit, it’s slightly ironic to now need this much power for tasks I used to run smoothly on Synology boxes over a decade ago. Even funnier is that Frigate may require a neural accelerator for its AI features—something that seems excessive when you consider modern AI models like YoLo run on microcontrollers with far less processing power. That said, I don’t plan to use AI in this setup (at least not yet), but I’ve still opted for a dual PCIe HAT to keep the door open for testing a Coral accelerator in the future.
Continue readingTag Archives: linux
Proxmox cluster setup
I recently created a Proxmox cluster for some physical machine … for making it short, it sometime more efficient to run its own machine that going to cloud, in particular when you can manage a lower service level. So I use a mix of solutions, some on VM running on cloud provider solution like for critical production (Helium services as an example) and I have some bare-metal machine for high computation service (like Helium ETL) where cloud provider would invoice $3000 a month and for the rest I decided to run a Proxmox cluster to have an intermediate low cost infra with a minimum of redundancy I can master.
I started with 2 nodes with the ability to move workload from one to the other and as recently i got a corruption on one of my ZFS storage loosing one of the NVME, I’ve been happy of this setup. Unfortunately, when restarting the damaged node after being repaired, the second one restarted all the VMs causing an unexpected service failure. Let’s see how to setup a Proxmox cluster for not getting into this.
Continue readingLinux host to host IP over infiniband
Some tips to configure host to host ip over infiniband
Continue readingDeploying Helium-ETL instance with API
Helium blockchain ETL is basically a copy of the Helium Blockchain into a database. That way you can query the helium blockchain history to build apps like monitoring, tax management…
The Helium blockchain API project is connected to the Helium ETL to get an easy access to these data.
I’m currently building a tool to monitor and alarm a fleet of hotspots (stay tuned) and it currently uses the Helium API (api.helium.io). But helium APIs are a bit overloaded and not made to support high rate querying from each of the application any member of the community is developing. So I’ve been decided to make my own instance of ETL and API for my own purpose. This is the experience I’ll describe in this blog post:
Continue readingBalenaFin – compute module motherboard
The BalenaFin board, made by balena.io is a compact Raspberry Pi compute module 3 mother board.
This kind of setup is really useful when making industrial embedded systems in small to average volume like I did and described in a previous post presenting my solution on waveshare system.
I thank you Balena.io, especially Marc, for giving me the opportunity to test this product. So you understand I did not payed to get that one, but as usual, I’m totally free about what I’m writing about it.
The BalenaFin costs $129 w/o taxes and can be ordered on the balena shop. So, let’s how to use it and get benefit of the balena.io platform.
Continue readingSecure your children Internet access
I’m a big fan of PiHole for my children but also for my IoT devices [not the one I build but the one I’m purchasing 🙂 ]. That said, there are two things missing in it:
- The first one is that Pi-Hole is operating on DNS request so any malicious solution using its own DNS or direct IP will bypass Pi-Hole protection.
- The second one is the lake of functionalities like stopping Internet for a certain group of user during certain period of time.
So, when a friend of me contacted me to share its work on a different solution using a proxy, I’ve been happy to let him make a blog post here to introduce his solution. And this solution can be used in complement of PiHole. So, let’s make some place here to Manu PILLANT
Continue readingClean a linux drive on Mac Os X
Short tips: when a drive has been formatted for Linux (like a SDCard for a RPI) and you want to clean it ans reuse it as a normal (Fat32) drive, you can’t do it from Diskutil graphical tool.
Continue readingTransfer UDP over SSH
When you want to transfer some UDP protocol from a remote server not directly accessible from your local host you can use a combination of SSH and socat to make this communication possible.
The application case is, as an exemple, a SNMP communication with a server in a DMZ to get metrics in a local area dashboard. Like in this exemple.

You have an intermediate host where SSH is accessible you can use as a gateway.
1- on the local host (on the left side), create a SSH tunnel with a TCP port forwarding (here 10000).
ssh -L 10000:localhost:10000 **gateway_host_ip**
2- on the gateway host, route the traffic received from the port we have previously associated to the UDP target host:port
socat tcp4-listen:10000,reuseaddr,fork UDP:**target_host_ip**:**udp_port**
3 – on the local host, route the traffic received from the given UDP port to the previously associated TCP port for tunnelling
socat -T15 udp4-recvfrom:**udp_port**,reuseaddr,fork tcp:localhost:10000
That’s it.