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.
In 2023 I have not done much in the homelab because I moved across my country. My plans for the future of the lab include lowering power consumption and simplifying infrastructure. The most notable event this year was the release of Debian 12. The Debian Linux distribution is now the operating system I am using on all of my machines including my laptop. Proxmox continues to be a reliable backbone to my lab.
My preferred text editor is vim because it is portable and highly customizable. Text editors can be used to edit configuration files on a system and write source files for scripts and programs. While you can run vim in a separate window in your operating system, it can also be run within a terminal emulator. You can even find the original version vi on most *nix systems that do not have any graphical interface.
Installing Dokuwiki on Kubernetes Previously, I had a post here with steps to install Dokuwiki with Docker. If you have a suitable Kubernetes platform, proceed. If you are not familiar with Kubernetes, see a post on the topic. I also have not been doing many homelab projects. Using Kubernetes to run and test apps has been a very stable experience and I haven’t needed to do much of anything to keep it running.
In my homelab, Proxmox is the main operating system that I use for servers. It is Debian Linux with some extra packages related to virtual machines and managing virtual machines. proxmox-logo Proxmox 8 introduces Debian 12 bookworm release as the underlying Operating System. If you are already running Proxmox 7 then read on to see how to upgrade your system. If you are not using Proxmox, I recommend checking out a previous post that introduces Proxmox and how to install it.
Today I will be sharing a method to obtain a wildcard TLS certificate for a domain that you control. A wildcard certificate is valid for any host in a domain that you control: *.example.net. To issue wildcard certificates, you must have a DNS provider such as the AWS route53 service which is what I will be using. You can use any DNS provider manually but most providers provide an API that makes the process easier.
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 core which is based on FreeBSD and Linux and uses the OpenZFS file system. Check out a previous post if you are not familiar and want to set it up.