AJ's Blog

TrueNAS for homelab storage

One of the most useful systems to set up in a homelab is shared storage. Making storage available over the network makes it easier to share files and make system backups.

A popular operating system for creating a network storage server is called TrueNAS which is based on FreeBSD and Linux and uses the OpenZFS file system. For a home lab, the BSD licensed free and public TrueNAS Core can be used in a homelab. This operating system is a stable base to set up SMB file shares for Windows clients, AFP for macOS, NFS for Linux, iSCSI for block storage, rsync daemons, and FTP servers.

KVM, QEMU, and libvirt

This post is taking a look at another suite of software to create and manage Virtual Machines. For a background on computer virtualization, check out a previous post.

Linux distributions support virtualization through the Linux kernel which is why the software is called KVM. This stands for “Kernel-based virtual machine”. It consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko.

Building websites with containers, hugo and AWS Amplify

Note (2025-10-12): This blog has been running on the same Amplify setup since this post. In 2025 the hugo build image was updated along with the site theme. The AWS Console has changed so look for a newer post about AWS Amplify

Deploying static sites to AWS Amplify is the updated post

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.

GitLab CI/CD and building containers

Update 2025-10-15: This method of building containers should be considered deprecated. The kaniko project is not maintained

GitLab CI/CD is a feature of the GitLab platform that is used in software development for Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment of software. The idea is that software source code will grow and evolve over time but you do not want to have to manually compile your code each time a change is made. This is especially true when you develop software as a team and multiple changes might be made in a single day.

Netboot.xyz

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

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:

• Bash
• Csh
• Ksh
• Tcsh
• Zsh

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.