AJ's Blog
This is a personal blog focused on computer software and hardware. Most
projects are implementing software and hardware for a homelab. What is a
homelab? I would say a homelab could be a single computer or dozens of
computers connected in a network. You can also integrate with computers
in the Cloud.
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Recent Posts
10-14-2024
I have previously worked with Postgres as a database. Check out a previous post if you are not familiar with Postgres. In that post I ran Postgres as a docker container and used psql to execute commands against the database. Today I am going to look at running Postgres with Podman as an alternative container engine and another container “adminer” which provides a web UI for interacting with a database. If you are not familiar with Podman, check out a previous post about alternatives to Docker.
10-13-2024
APCUPSd, short for APC UPS daemon, is an open-source software suite designed to monitor APC (American Power Conversion) brand uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). APCUPSd allows continuous monitoring of APC UPS devices. It retrieves information such as battery status, load levels, input/output voltage, and other critical parameters from the UPS.
I have looked at a similar software previously for my homelab systems. It was called Network UPS Tools (NUT). Check out a previous post to learn more about NUT and getting metrics from it.
09-13-2024
Renovate is used to help manage code dependencies. Checkout a previous post for more details on what Renovate is.
Renovate is able to parse dockerfiles to look for newer container images. This only works with either a sha256 digest or a version tag. Tags such as latest or some other arbitrary string will not work.
I tested running renovate as a docker container. Credentials can be used with environment variables within the container.
09-02-2024
PostgreSQL is a relational database management system. It is extremely popular as it is open source and scales to billions of rows. Other popular DBMS systems include some that are not open source. There are some open source apps that I use at home that require a database and I am interested in spending more time developing my own software. This post will go over the basics of using a PostgreSQL database.
07-21-2024
A GPU can be used to run applications that leverage machine learning models as well as the name suggests, graphics applications. In the homelab I will use a GPU to run AI models, transcode media files, and any other application that can leverage GPU hardware acceleration.
Using a GPU in a Kubernetes cluster involves setting up the cluster to recognize and allocate GPU resources to pods that require them.
Prerequisites First of all, you need a Kubernetes cluster and a computer with a Nvidia GPU that is also joined to the Kubernetes cluster.
07-21-2024
The openEBS project is simplified, easy to deploy and upgrade, open source, persistent block storage on the Kubernetes platform. If you are not familiar with Kubernetes (k8s), check out a previous post to get started. If you are using Kubernetes in a homelab which is what I focus on in this blog, you may notice that setting up apps that worked well in Docker are much more challenging in Kubernetes. It is very easy to set up static web apps in Kubernetes as the container image includes all the files you need.