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
05-02-2025
In a previous post, I started using Grafana Alloy to collect logs from my systems. You can also use this project in Kubernetes with a Helm chart. If you are not familiar with Kubernetes, check out a previous post that provides a high level overview.
Install on Kubernetes If you are using Kubernetes, the chart can be used to install and configure Grafana Alloy to collect logs from containers.
To deploy Alloy on Kubernetes using Helm, run the following commands in a terminal window:
05-01-2025
As of April 2025, Fedora 42 is available. Compared to the previous release, Fedora 41, this is a quite important release because well 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything. That’s an old reference to scifi literature.
This release comes with updates like GNOME Desktop 48. This introduces v-sync triple buffering to animations in the desktop. There is also a new installer for Fedora that uses a web UI.
04-19-2025
Promtail was a project I used as part of the Grafana Loki log collection ecosystem. It was deprecated as Grafana now recommends using the Grafana Alloy project to help collect telemetry data. Promtail made it relatively easy to collect logs from containers and files on a *nix system. I also used the Kubernetes helm chart to collect pod logs in Kubernetes and forward to Grafana Loki.
My last post about Grafana Loki was upgrading from v2 to v3.
04-17-2025
Prometheus can be configured to write metrics to a remote prometheus API to achieve replication and/or sharding. If you are looking for information about what to do with Prometheus or what it is, check out a previous post to get an overview. I am using remote write to have one Prometheus server running in Kubernetes which I have configured to remote write metrics to another Prometheus server on my network that has a larger disk and is outside the k8s cluster.
04-03-2025
Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine designed for scalability and flexibility. It allows you to store, search, and analyze large volumes of data quickly and efficiently. Elasticsearch is part of the Elastic Stack. This is a powerful platform that has many strengths when most of your data is text based and you may need to search for text. It supports horizontal scaling and stores data in an Index.
03-30-2025
While I was writing the post about parsing data from the strong app on iOS, I stopped using this app. Now that I have this historical data there are a few approaches but as someone who is busy I ended up using another iOS app that has a native app for the apple watch. It also directly imported all my workout history so stay tuned as I will next be taking a look at any differences in that data.