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

Building websites with containers, hugo and AWS Amplify

01-08-2022

AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services that can be used together or on their own, to help front-end web and mobile developers build scalable full stack applications, powered by AWS (Amazon Web Services). With Amplify, you can configure app backends and connect your app in minutes, deploy static web apps in a few clicks, and easily manage app content outside of AWS.

Use the Amplify console to host static websites and single page web apps with a Git-based workflow, simply by connecting your app’s git repository. With this service, you do not have to configure infrastructure to host your site, and can just commit changes to a git repository.

Netboot.xyz

12-31-2021

The tool netboot.xyz can be used to bootstrap operating systems onto new physical or virtual computers and also run utilities to recover data over the network. With this tool you can PXE boot without having to create a lot of infrastructure to support PXE installations. With netboot.xyz, I can use a single bootable image on a usb drive or mounted to a virtual machine to install many different operating systems. This tool leverages the iPXE project to load different operating system images.

ZShell

12-19-2021

What is a shell?

The shell is a program that translates human readable words (commands) and converts them into binary data that the Operating System kernel can interpret. The shell can interpret commands entered from the keyboard or a file commonly refered to as a script.

You can access the shell through a terminal program on the local computer or remotely using SSH.

The most popular shells that I am aware of are:

ZSH

Zsh is a shell that builds on shells such as bash, ksh, and tcsh. Zsh offers some useful features such as better tab completion.

Dokuwiki homelab wiki

12-04-2021

Dokuwiki is an open-source wiki software that isn’t too fancy, perfect for documenting a personal homelab. This software does not require a database and is easy to host and backup running as a container.

Installing and configuring Dokuwiki with Docker

In order to run the Dokuwiki server, I will be using a docker container inside of a virtual machine. In order to keep this post concise, please check out my previous post on docker if you are not familiar with the technology. I also have a post on setting up virtual machines and yet another post on setting up a dedicated system to run virtual machines with proxmox.

Rancher Desktop

11-20-2021

rancher_desktop
rancher_desktop
Rancher Desktop is an open-source project to bring Kubernetes and container management to your workstation.

For more information about containers, check out a previous post.

Installing Rancher Desktop

Rancher Desktop can be installed on Windows, macOS, and various Linux distributions. The most up to date installation packages will be on the official documentation. This application has an auto-update feature once it is installed onto you system.

rancher_desktop
rancher_desktop

nerdctl

Rancher Desktop can build, push, and pull container images (powered by nerdctl)