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
06-04-2022
The second most important resources in a homelab other than the lab itself are backups. It is critical not only to take backups but verify that you can restore your backups. I have settled for taking images of the entire host operating system but have run into challenges trying to mount disk images that approach 1 TB or more. I decided to slim down my backups for certain servers. For most servers, I just need config files and persistent data such as databases.
05-29-2022
The primary goal of the Network UPS Tools (NUT) project is to provide support for Power Devices, such as Uninterruptible Power Supplies, Power Distribution Units, Automatic Transfer Switches, Power Supply Units and Solar Controllers. Some of those sound exciting but at this time I only have Uninterruptible Power Supplies.
My environment has 5 UPS devices connected to various servers and networking equipment. They also are not the same model or vendor.
05-22-2022
Terraform is a tool for orchestrating infrastructure as code with human-readable configuration files. It can be used to create objects in the cloud and in the homelab. Similar to ansible, terraform abstracts various other APIs used to provision virtual machines, containers, or an entire public cloud ecosystem.
terraform Terraform has an active community that contributes “providers” that interface with various resources and services. For example I will be switching my entire lab to using terraform.
05-15-2022
update 2024: the official cadvisor image now supports arm which means it will work on Pis
cadvisor_logo cadvisor exporter is used by Prometheus to monitor container metrics. If you are not familiar with prometheus, check out a previous post. The cadvisor program will collect metrics and make them available on a http server. Prometheus needs to be configured to collect metrics from the cadvisor exporter and then grafana can be used to visualize those metrics.
05-14-2022
Note: I drafted this in January 2022 but I did not realize that this distro seems to be no longer maintained after SUSE acquired Rancher in 2021. I am going to upload this post because I enjoyed how flexible this distro was for running k3s.
k3OS is a Linux distribution designed to remove as much OS maintenance as possible in a Kubernetes cluster. It is specifically designed to only have what is needed to run k3s.
04-03-2022
rancher_desktop Rancher Desktop is an open-source project to bring Kubernetes and container management to your workstation.
For more information about installing Rancher Desktop or containers, check out a previous post.
If you are not familiar with Kubernetes, check out a previous post about getting started.
Installation is trivial on most platforms, I will briefly touch on installation on Linux as I happen to be using openSUSE at the time of this post.