Basement Corner Shelf

Last post I talked about putting in some flooring and shelving as part of revamping my basement space a bit. I ended up with a couple of issues after the initial work, one was sort of previously an issue, one new. The desks don’t quite fill the wall from my Photo Booth to the pillar halfway down the wall. This was, sort of an issue before. The secondary issue, I have this Raspberry Pi Rack that I previously had sitting on a shorter bookcase next to the desk. That bookcase has been relocated, and the new book cases reach the ceiling instead of, four feet or so up, so putting the rack on top is kind of out of the question.

Another potential issue with this space involves the cats. While they have not done it yet, it’s kind of the perfect sort of space for them to sneak in and start peeing on the floor.

Basically, it needed to be filled.

My original plan was to make a super basic little table that was the same height as the desk to fill in the hole. When I started planning it out, I realized that there wasn’t really any reason that the shelf could not be taller, so I opted to make it the same height as the new book cases.

There are some other challenged in designing this shelf. I didn’t want it to be deeper than the book shelves, at least not up top, but the end of the desk doesn’t reach the front of the book shelves. So the new unit would need to be slightly “L” shaped. Another problem was the power strip hanging off the end of the desk. While the basement has water issues in places (that I’ve been working to resolve), it’s never flooded anywhere near the desk and flooring area. I’ve still taken the precaution of making sure there isn’t anything electronic on the floor, so the power strip is strapped to the end of the desk.

Part of the purpose of the new unit was to also hide this wiring mess. But I still need it to be accessible. When the shelf was just going to be a short table, this was easy, make the top removable. Since I was making the shelf taller, I had to redesign things a bit so the middle shelf was removable instead.

After sketching out the general idea of what I was going for, I purchased some white pre-finished boards from Menards and set about cutting and assembling the new shelf unit. I used pre-finished boards so it would match the IKEA shelving.The base of the unit is pretty straight forward. It’s a square box. For the removable shelf, I built in a square of support blocks and cut a piece to fit. Since the unit sits flush against the one wall, I opted to leave the vertical gap on the right side open. This gives a place to reach in and pick up the removable shelf, plus a path to slip cables through for anything that’s temporarily plugged in. For the more permanent connections like Network cables going to the switch in the Pi rack, I later drilled a hole in the fixed back half of the middle shelf.

For the more permanent connections like Network cables going to the switch in the Pi rack, I later drilled a hole in the fixed back half of the middle shelf. The back half being fixed in place also means that I don’t have to completely remove the Pi Rack and Alexa anytime I want to open up and get to the Power strip.

After adding a stained piece of backing to the shelf, I went up and drilled some shallow holes to add shelving. I ended up liking these small shelves much more than I expected honestly. I can put some of my tech stuff on one for easier access and I really like the additional mini display areas for some of my more favored figures.

After putting the shelf in I found I needed to make a few last bit touch ups. Firstly the front was more exposed than expected, so I added a vertical board to fill in the space. I also need to get some white paint to touch up the tops of the front vertical pieces.

Overall though I am really happy with the result.

Basement, Old Floor, New Floor

Last year, we had all the floors in the upstairs main part of the house replaced. When purchasing the flooring, the store we purchased from was running a tiered rebate deal. Essentially, we could buy $500 worth of additional flooring than we needed for the upstairs, and tier up to the next rebate level, which was $500 additional savings. My point is, we basically ended up with a pile of free bonus flooring. The plan was to put some of it down in the basement. It wouldn’t be enough to cover the entire basement, or even half, but it would be a start.

Upstairs has doors and counters, and all sorts of things that make flooring tricky. The Basement, not so much. The basement is essentially just a square with some pillars in it. It’s also a basement, so it doesn’t need to be super perfect. I have put in some similar flooring a few houses ago when we converted the garage to a family room. I could easily do this.

This flooring job also has been sort of the kick off of actually doing a LOT of major work and rearranging to the basement. So I figured it might be useful to have a little map. The basement, essentially has 4 “areas”. My “Office area”, in the upper left quadrant. The “LEGO area” in the upper middle. There is the “TV Area” in the lower right corner of the map. Lastly, my son has an area that constitutes his room, though there aren’t any actual walls there. It is segmented off on one side by a build in bar/counter space and a couple of shelving units in the middle of the room against the support pillars.

FWIW, my son it an adult and spends more time living with his friends elsewhere than he does actually living in our house. Before anyone gets on my about shoving my kid off in the corner.

Also, the basement actually has two halves, one half is used for storage and isn’t particularly finished out in any real great way, which is why I installed the door.

The first step of this project actually wasn’t the flooring, technically. The first step was obtaining some IKEA shelving. I’ve wanted to get some Billy shelves for several years now but I don’t have an IKEA in the area. When I finally was ready to get them, I discovered that IKEA doesn’t deliver over long distances. Which wasn’t helped by well, the current Pandemic. Things seemed to be getting better as far as the Pandemic however, and a month or so ago, I had taken a vacation day to take my wife to a Doctor’s appointment, which got rescheduled. So we opted to drive down to St Louis and go to the IKEA store.

She really liked IKEA herself, being an organizing junkie.

Another step I needed to take before the flooring was prepping the floor itself. There were a handful of nail things sticking out of the concrete, presumably from some previous wall or floor that was once in the basement. Also around each of these was a divot int he floor. I took a chisel and busted off the nails and then filled in the divots with some concrete filler. You can see these spots in the before photo above, where the dark gray spots are on the floor.

The other large step was clearing out my collection so I could move the furniture around. Despite having quite a lot of room in the basement, I did a lot the shelf clear out while installing the floor. I put a lot of the more durable stuff (Transformers) carefully into a large plastic bin, and then places a lot of the other figures on a long folding table. Another minor issue, my son basically decided he was going to come live with us again, the same day I was starting to do my work. So my original plan of putting up more tables in his space didn’t really work out.

Basically, I started at the back wall, unloading everything to a table or a tote, and moved the shelf, glass cabinet, and photo station out 3-4 feet. I did a final clean and mop of the floor, then laid several rows of the flooring down. Once I had enough flooring, I pushed those furniture pieces back and stacked stuff onto them from the other shelves, so i could move other pieces of furniture.

I also assembled and stood up the 3 IKEA shelves as I went. The other purpose for shuffling the future this way was to help hold the flooring down. I don’t really have an easy way to add trim on the concrete basement walls. So the furniture around the perimeter is what I’ve got.

After everything was finished, I started reassembling my displays over the next few days. I also found that I needed to add a short 3′ extension piece to the power strip feeding my PC, because the new shelving is a little wider than the old combination, and the cord didn’t reach far enough behind the shelves. Other minor electrical change, the Glass Cabinet has a light in it, but the cord switch is a pain to use. I also have an Alexa compatible power outlet I don’t really have a use for. I set up this power outlet so I can tell Alexa to “Turn on the Display Light” and light up the cabinet.

I am pretty pleased with the end result. It’s not perfect but it’s a bit nicer than it was. This has also spawned several additional projects which I’ll blog about in the future.

Migrating Mail-In-A-Box to a New VPS

A few years ago, I started running my own mail server using Mail-In-A-Box. Four years or so actually, if the age of my old server was accurate. I have several different email addresses, mostly to better segment out content. I have done this with Reddit, and Twitter, and TT-RSS, and probably other things. In my Mail-In-A-Box I run email for 3 domains, two of mine, one for my wife’s. Overtime I may eventually migrate all of my email to it, at this point, I am a little worried about being blacklisted, so I mostly use it for secondary, receive only, email aggregation.

For a while I’ve been putting off migrating the system to a new VPS. It’s been running on Ubuntu 14.04 since it was created. Newer MiaB won’t run on 14.04 and I can’t distro update the machine. The only choice is to roll a new VPS and migrate the mail.

I use Digital Ocean for my online services, feel free to sign up with the link in the side bar if you want, I get a little kickback if you do. It’s easy to use and affordable. Plus in cases like this, I can spin up an extra VPS, then easily destroy it and spin up a new one, when I discover that MiaB only works up through 18.04, so 20.04, which I used initially, won’t work. Also having the extra server just means a temporary bump in my billing for the month.

The basic process for migrating Mail-In-A-Box is here, in the official documentation. I had a few hiccups along the way but I got them ironed out.

First step was creating the new machine. I mentioned above, I first made a 20.04 machine, but found that doesn’t work, so I killed that and made a new 18.04 machine. Before anything else, I did a few security based housecleaning tasks. The server was creating with Shared Keys log in set up, but it only had a root account. So I created a new user and made them a sudoer. I also copied the SSH keys from root to the user.

adduser Username
usermod -aG sudo Username
cp ~/.ssh /home/Username
chown Username:Username /home/Username/.ssh -R

Next step was to add the new user to the SSH users and secure up that access.

sudo pico /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Then edit:

#Port 22

To a custom port and change:

PermitRootLogin no

Finally add:

AllowUsers Username

Lastly restart the ssh server with sudo service sshd restart. Then test the connection using the regular user. If that works, then disconnect from the root session and continue on the regular user.

I was doing an upgrade but the fresh install guide is here. All I needed was the set up line really, which takes a minute to run but does an initial set up of Mail-in-a-Box.

curl -s https://mailinabox.email/setup.sh | sudo -E bash

The next part was the trickiest bit. I linked the migration article above but I ended up trying to simplify things a bit. On the old machine, I stopped the mailinabox service, so no new mail would come in, then ran the backup python script as described int he article above. I found it was easiest to just connect to the server using Filezilla using SSH FTP, which meant importing my keys to Filezilla. It’s in the settings under SFTP. Something to keep in mind if you set a custom port is you’ll need to add sftp:// before the IP address.

Things are a little tricky here, since root owns the backup folder. I ended up doing a sudo copy into my user home directory, then a chown on the folder to give my user account access to the folder. This meant Filezilla could see the folder and download it to my local machine. There are way to directly transfer between the new and old server, but between custom ports and SSH keys and permissions, I found it was easiest just to download to my local laptop. Afterwards, I connected with SFTP to the NEW server, and pushed the backup folder to the new server. You need the whole folder with the “secret_key” text file and the encrypted folder and files. Basically, this is all the settings and emails.

Next step was to ssh into the New Server, go to the freshly uploaded backup directory, and import the old files, as described in the link. This is two commands run, separately.

export PASSPHRASE=$(cat secret_key.txt)

sudo -E duplicity restore --force file:///home/Username/backup/encrypted /home/user-data/

This takes a minute to run. The next step listed is to rerun the mailinabox set up with “sudo mailinabox”.

I had trouble here. Nginx would not restart. After sound troubleshooting I found it was an issue with SSL. Basically what seemed to happen was the restore, pulled the old SSL certs. Or maybe it was looking for the old SSL certs. Whatever the case, the fix was this process.

rm -rf /home/user-data/ssl/*

The fix was to delete the SSL certificates. then run “sudo mailinabox”. Everything started up. I verified I could log into the control panel and the mailbox using the UP address of the new server. I verified that all my custom DNS records existed, these are needed since the Glue Records point to the Mail-In-A-Box machine but because I host my websites on a separate machine, I have to have DNS records set up appropriately.

One thing I noticed was the SSL Certificates seemed to be wrong, which meant things worked, but would cause annoying security messages. I am not sure if this was related to deleting the certs above, or just that it was still looking for the old IP address. Whatever the case, I did a manual update with certbox for my MiaB Subdomain using

sudo certbot certonly --force-renewal -d Subdomain.Domain.comHere

Another minor issue I ran into, doing this needs to drop a file either in the webroot folder, or spin up a temporary web server to host it’s own file. I couldn’t find the webroot for the custom MiaB set up (it was not /var/www/html) so I temporarily ran “sudo service nginx stop”, then ran the above certbox command, using a temporary webserver option, then “sudo service nginx start” to restart Nginx. NGinx had to be stopped since otherwise it is using Port 80, and the temporary server can’t start to runt he certificate verification process.

Another note, I am not sure if the –force-renewal option is needed above. It didn’t throw out any errors and it fixed the issue, so I left it.

The final step was to go to my Domain Registrar and update the name servers and Glue Records to point to the new Server IP. After a short bit of waiting, eventually the mail server URL connected to the admin and web consoles. I did some test send and receive of emails between my server and gmail to verify everything was working properly. One nice bit, the newer MiaB has a different interface for Roundcube webmail, so I could easily tell if I was going to the new or old server.

Once everything was satisfactory, i went back to Digital Ocean and powered down the old server. If everything is still working in a few days, I will destroy the old server, so I don’t have to keep paying upkeep on it. One thing to keep in mind, both the old and new servers require a specific hostname, so they will be named the same, so double check that you are powering down and deleting the correct server. some easy ways to verify are IP address, or server age. The old server is several years old but the new server is several days old.