Van Life – Rehabbing a rusty 22 year old Dodge Ram Van 1500, Part 1 of many

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My wife has been documenting this but I figure I would post it here for a more permanent place and accessible place than Facebook. Hopefully it helps someone or, you get a good chuckle out of this project that we’re taking on.

“A 2000 Dodge Ram 1500 Van with only 67K miles that I won from a government auction (was a Ocean Springs School District Child Nutrition Division van) for pretty cheap. Now, she looks a bit worse for the wear, but the rust is all surface, so with a new paint job, changing out the fluids, new tires, and other general mechanical things, she’ll look brand new.

I wanted to get a van to ultimately have an adventure vehicle, especially in my upcoming retired life. Something that can be boon-docked for camping, carrying stuff, road tripping, and would have less of a likelihood of getting stolen or broken into while parked for a while compared to my BMV (which is not quite the adventure touring car anyways) and something smaller and more manageable than our RV, Sheila.

Anyways, excited to start working on this project and I’m going to be documenting it along the way as we transform it from this is a #VanLife van.”

SSD Controller performance and Silicon Power

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Recently we discovered that a slew of Silicon Power NVMe drives we had, all with the same P/N, being the P34A80 drives had various arrangements of controllers and NAND.

So far we have discovered at least three controllers on this same P/N Model. Those being:

We found that the Silicon Motion 2262 was an adequately performing controller but the other two are terribly under powered. The SM 2263XT is only a 4 channel controller whereas the other two are 8 channel. The Phison E12 is about 1/2 the speed of the SM2262.

SM2262:

sequential-fill: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=3733: Tue Jul 12 16:32:25 2022
  Description  : [Sequential fill phase]
  write: IOPS=1039, BW=1039MiB/s (1089MB/s)(609GiB/600013msec); 0 zone resets

random-write-steady: (groupid=1, jobs=4): err= 0: pid=4163: Tue Jul 12 16:32:25 2022
  Description  : [Random write steady state phase]
  write: IOPS=198k, BW=774MiB/s (812MB/s)(454GiB/600001msec); 0 zone resets

Phison E12:

sequential-fill: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=3775: Tue Jul 12 16:32:29 2022
  Description  : [Sequential fill phase]
  write: IOPS=762, BW=762MiB/s (799MB/s)(447GiB/600040msec); 0 zone resets

random-write-steady: (groupid=1, jobs=4): err= 0: pid=4168: Tue Jul 12 16:32:29 2022
  Description  : [Random write steady state phase]
  write: IOPS=55.9k, BW=219MiB/s (229MB/s)(128GiB/600002msec); 0 zone resets

OpenNMS Horizon 30 Update / 503 / Karaf Failure

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When upgrading to OpenNMS Horizon 30, you may find that even after following standard upgrade procedures it will produce a HTTP/503 for you. Meaning Jetty started but… Karaf is dead. This appears to be another *finger guns* gotcha by the OpenNMS team for the non-paid product.

You must MANUALLY update your config.properties file in opennms/etc to update the reference for Felix that was upgraded from 6.0.4 to 6.0.5;

config.properties:karaf.framework.felix=mvn\:org.apache.felix/org.apache.felix.framework/6.0.4

to

config.properties:karaf.framework.felix=mvn\:org.apache.felix/org.apache.felix.framework/6.0.5

Wiki.JS docker-compose w/ postgres persistent storage via NFS and Traefik

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Here’s an example of our docker-file for Wiki.JS with NFS DB storage, Postgres and Traefik;

version: "3"
volumes:
  db-data:
      driver_opts:
        type: "nfs"
        o: addr=nfshost.example.com,nolock,soft,rw
        device: ":/mnt/Pool0/WikiJS"
services:
  db:
    image: postgres:11-alpine
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: wiki
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: Supersecurepassword
      POSTGRES_USER: wikijs
    command: postgres -c listen_addresses='*'
    logging:
      driver: "none"
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - internal
    labels:
     - traefik.enable=false
    volumes:
      - type: volume
        source: db-data
        target: /var/lib/postgresql/data
        volume:
            nocopy: true


  wiki:
    image: ghcr.io/requarks/wiki:2
    depends_on:
      - db
    environment:
      DB_TYPE: postgres
      DB_HOST: db
      DB_PORT: 5432
      DB_USER: wikijs
      DB_PASS: Supersecurepassword
      DB_NAME: wiki
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - proxy
      - internal
    labels:
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.docker.network=proxy"
      - "traefik.http.routers.ex-wikijs.entrypoints=https"
      - "traefik.http.routers.ex-wikijs.rule=Host(`wikijs.example.com`)"
      - "traefik.http.services.ex-wikijs.loadbalancer.server.port=3000"

networks:
  proxy:
    external: true
  internal:
    external: false

This stands up a postgres instance using the NFS mount as storage, allows the internal network to connect to it, stands up a wiki.js instance and gets it all going for you. All behind a Traefik proxy.

iPhone / iPad / iOS / MacOS one way SMS

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I recently upgraded my iPhone, and upon doing so it was shortly apparent that while my other devices were still receiving SMS forwarding, they could not reply/send SMS. iMessage worked fine, and after a frustrating number of things tried to resolve the issue. The one that did it for me was simply;

Open Settings -> Messages on your iPhone

On the Use iMessage toggle, toggle it to Off/Disable it.

Reboot your iPhone ( with iMessage still disabled )

Upon your phone coming back up, unlock it, go back to settings -> Messages, re-enable iMessage and wait about 60 seconds. SMS sending should now work from your other devices.

Sigh. That was frustrating and so simple to fix.

LED Rope Lighting / Alexa

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I’ve had a few people ask me about this so, I figured I would write an article on what I used to do it.

Parts List:

Zigbee/Zwave Controller: I utilize a SmartThings hub ( now Aeotec ) but you can use anything that is compatible with Zigbee/Zwave if you already have a hub.

RGBW Controller: I used a monoprice 136511 but it looks like maybe they aren’t making these any more or are sold out? Any RGBW controller that is Z-Wave or Zigbee will work, just make sure it supports enough amperage to power your LED strips, depending on length, this can be up to 20 Amps.

LED Power Supply: Now this depends on your LED length and voltage, I used 12VDC 16′ light sections from Amazon for the big ceiling, these are three of those strips connected together. As such I need quite a bit of amperage at 12VDC, so I chose a hard wired PSU which I added a cooling fan to the top of.

For our shorter runs, we used standard power brick style PSUs. Although you could use this style for both, it has enough power capability.

LED Strips: I chose generic RGBWW ( Warm White ) LED strips that are pretty cheap with an adhesive backing to them.

Installation:

Installation is fairly simple if you hare hand and know basic electrical skills.

Power supply to the RGBW controller, controller to the LED light strip(s).

Generally, once the controller is powered the hub you have will see it and you’ll be able to adopt it and it basically just works from there, I’m not going to go into detail on this step because the variations depending upon your devices is limitless but, as long as they speak the same protocol(s): Z-Wave or Zigbee, you should have no issues.

We used multiple controllers, one for each set of LEDs so that they could be controlled individually, with things like SmartThings and Alexa you can group them so if you want them to change together they can, or they can be told to change independently, the flexibility is yours.

We have fantastic ceilings that have a great place to hide the lights behind some crown moulding, and we couldn’t be happier with the results, this is 2-years into these being in service and being used every day and they all still work perfectly:

The green around the fan is one controller, and one adjoined long set of RGBWW LEDs.

The red around the TV and above it are another set of two LED strips connected with a longer extension but controlled by the same controller.

The white gap on the left above the fireplace is our dining room on another controller. We also have started adding them underneath our cabinets in the kitchen although that project has stalled a bit lol.