I discovered an interesting… problem. Apparently the speaker group will disconnect from Chrome in two cases: The audio stream has few minutes of no audio out between 20-24 hours the connection will drop So I have to access the console of the Virtual Machine to reconnect Chrome to the Speaker Group. It’s annoying but not a deal breaker - just annoying. I thought I would post an update to let anyone else know that Chromecast has a 20-24 hour connection limit.

So… A day or two ago I wrote about setting up a VM to stream music to my Google Home Speakers. Since then, I realized a better option - just use Google Chrome/Chromium to stream directly - 🤦‍♂️. I was so focus on the problem, I didn’t realize this option: Original goal was to not have a desktop environment (CLI Only) When I did switch to having a DE I used my preferred browser - Firefox Now I get the same functionality as described in the reference post above, but only using ‘one’ application - Chromium.

Idea/Project: Stream audio to multiple Google Home Devices for a whole home audio system. Instead of using a mobile device to stream/control the music, I want to use a container/virtual machine. Background: I have been streaming background music from a tablet to a single Echo Dot. I have three Google Home devices located around my place, and they can be grouped into a speaker group. Since I don’t want to dedicate a tablet solely to play music, especially considering it occasionally stops due to random reboots.

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Ubuntu 24) was released at the end of April. I have some thoughts about this release. The main reason I’m ‘reviewing’ this release is because I’m going to be using this particular version for the basis of my production servers. I want to gain some hands-on experience before deploying it to production. I decided to test the desktop versions (Gnome & XFCE) of Ubuntu 24 in Proxmox 7.

Download the OVA/OVF to the proxmox host Unzip/Extract OVA to expose vmdk and OVF You many need to apt install unzip Shell to the Proxmox Host to the directory of the OVF/VMDK Use the following command qm importovf {vmid} {OVA/OVF Filename}.ovf {target storage} To import to VM 101 with the ovf named web101.ovf to the vmdata storage location qm importovf 101 web101.ovf vmdata !! Note: VM should not already exist !

Welcome One and All to my experiments… I’m using this site to document my adventures with my homelab and other interesting information that I run across in the process. As of today (March 25, 2024) I don’t have a lot of information posted, but I will update this site with what I’m playing with or testing at the moment. I have posted a list of the physical hardware and software stack of my homelab also, I will try to keep those up to date as things change.