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
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.
03-13-2022
Uptime kuma is an open-source tool for monitoring uptime for
HTTP(s) TCP HTTP(s) Keyword Ping DNS Record Push Steam Game Server Updated 2023-05-14
This is one of my more popular posts according to Google and I still use Uptime Kuma. I am going to recreate my own instance and go over how to deploy the app and how to deploy a secure reverse proxy in front of the app.
Install with Docker Prerequisites Originally I had set up a virtual machine in the Amazon Web Services Cloud (AWS) but for the purposes of this monitoring app, AWS is too expensive.
02-27-2022
updated: 2025-02-08 : update post with slug prometheus-homelab updated: 2023-10-01 : updated container image tags, updated proxmox exporter, replaced deprecated ansible role for node_exporter
Note This is an older post. I have different approaches to running an observability stack for metrics. Check out a new post for monitoring prometheus metrics in a homelab with opentelemetry.
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting software. Prometheus collects and stores metrics as time series data, so one dimension of the data is always based on the time that the metric was recorded.
02-24-2022
Relax-and-Recover is an open-source tool to create computer backup archives and bootable ISO images of a Linux system. ReaR creates a bootable image consisting of the latest state of the system to be backed up. This image can be used for disaster recovery. ReaR was designed to be easy to setup and can be run through a cron job with minimal effort if you have storage somewhere for storing backup images.
02-18-2022
A Raspberry Pi (not pie) is a single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi foundation and Broadcom. The Pi was designed to promote basic computer science education around the world with a low cost computer that is accessible to developing nations. The Pi has been very popular world wide far beyond the original scope of the first product released. The newest single-board unit as of this post is the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B which contains a 64 bit processor, 1,2,4,or 8 GB of memory, 1 Gigabit Ethernet network interface, 2x USB 2 type A ports, 2x USB 3 type A ports, 2x micro HDMI ports, USB type C for power, 3.