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
05-22-2022
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Note: I drafted this in January 2022 but I did not realize that this distro seems to be no longer maintained after SUSE acquired Rancher in 2021.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.
03-26-2022
updated: 2025-02-09
Blackbox exporter is used by Prometheus to monitor HTTP(S), TCP, DNS, and ICMP endpoints. If you are not familiar with prometheus, check out a previous post. The blackbox program will collect metrics and make them available on a http server. Prometheus needs to be configured to collect metrics from the blackbox exporter and then grafana can be used to visualize those metrics.
Configure blackbox Blackbox is configured with a .
03-19-2022
Kubernetes, also known as k8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and managment of containerized applications. The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot. K8s as an abbreviation results from counting the eight letters between the “K” and the “s”. Kubernetes builds on 15 years of development powering the largest search engine Google with contributions from the open-source community. Kubernetes is focused on scalability from running to to a billion containers.