Linux

TL;DR In my opinion, these self-hosted, open-source applications are the best of what open-source can be. Home Assistant Jellyfin Pi-hole Nextcloud WordPress Introduction My hot water tank recently leaked, but (luckily for me) there was a floor drain right next to it. The next day (after having the tank fixed), I purchased a water leak sensor, added it to Home Assistant in under 2 minutes, and was able to get push notifications of future detected leaks. ...

Introduction I’ve been trying to get my homelab applications moved from running on VM/LXC to Docker. There’s nothing wrong with VMs or LXC containers, but I’m trying to manage fewer servers and “snowflakes” (even though I do my installs with Ansible). The application that started my homelab journey was DokuWiki. It’s a self-hosted wiki, written in PHP, that requires no database. You write in a Markdown-like syntax (not Markdown) and your data is stored in plain TXT files on the filesystem. DokuWiki, however, is not 100% straightforward to Dockerize. ...

Hey! Listen! This post is part of a series on my journey into K3s. Check them all out! Date URL Part 2022-12-07 K3s cluster updates Updates to the cluster build 2022-03-29 Kubernetes GUIs Exploring Kubernetes GUIs 2022-03-11 K3s single-node cluster for noobs Deploying K3s Introduction In my last post, I setup a K3s single-node cluster and an example application. While everything was done through the command-line, as a noob, it’s nice to have a graphical user interface (GUI) of some kind. I’m not a fan of ClickOps, but it’s convenient to have a GUI to be able to quickly view status, instead of hunting for the right kubectl command. ...

Hey! Listen! This post is part of a series on my journey into K3s. Check them all out! Date URL Part 2022-12-07 K3s cluster updates Updates to the cluster build 2022-03-29 Kubernetes GUIs Exploring Kubernetes GUIs 2022-03-11 K3s single-node cluster for noobs Deploying K3s Introduction I’m starting a new job in the next few days that will require me to learn Kubernetes (often stylized as k8s). This post is not about what k8s is or why you want it (you can read about that here). My only objective for now is to have a single-node k8s cluster running in my homelab. ...

Introduction If you’ve ever used a Raspberry Pi, you’ve probably used the raspi-config configuration tool. This text-based user interface (TUI) is great for changing 99% of basic settings on the Raspberry Pi, such as the hostname, WiFi country, locale, memory split, etc… However, if you’re managing a fleet of Raspberry Pi devices, or just really like configuration management tools, you’re probably looking for a way to automate setting these items from the command line. I’m not sure how I’ve never come across this, but I just learned that raspi-config has a mostly undocumented non-interactive mode that will do precisely that. ...

Introduction I’m on a quest to SSL all the things on my local network. I work in IT security, and am more than paranoid when it comes to my homelab (shout-out to r/homelab and r/selfhosted). For my web applications, everything is accessed through a Nginx reverse proxy that uses Let’s Encrypt wildcard certificates (using the DNS challenge) for encryption. It provides a single choke-point for all my traffic, all using one wildcard certificate, and all my clients accept it with the green lock. ...

Introduction I have a small homelab in my home that runs pfSense, Proxmox, Docker, a Synology NAS, UniFi wireless, etc… I already monitor my pfSense firewall logs using Graylog, but I was looking for a solution to monitor hardware (e.g., CPU usage, RAM usage, etc…) as well as software processes (e.g., containers using network, current download/upload speed, etc…). I stumbled upon two separate software stacks for this. First is the TICK stack, which is composed of open-source products from InfluxData: ...

Introduction In my last post, I went over linting Ansible playbooks manually. In this post, I’m going to give you a brief introduction on how to lint playbooks automatically, using Drone. I was inspired to post this after watching Jeff Geerling’s (geerlingguy on Github) Ansible 101 YouTube series. In it, he mentions using automated testing/linting of his playbooks. If you haven’t seen it, give it a watch. As with before, I’m not a developer or professional DevOps person. I know just enough to be dangerous, but this should be enough to get you going. ...

Introduction What is Ansible? If you’re reading this, you probably already know what Ansible is, so I won’t spend a lot of time here. Ansible is open-source configuration management software. It lets you configure one machine, or 100 machines, in the same way, every time. You can use Ansible to install software, create users, update files, etc… Basically, if it’s a task that can be automated, Ansible can do it. I’m using Ansible in my homelab to: ...

Hey! Listen! This post is part of a series on the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. Check them all out! Date URL Part 2019-06-28 Migrating away from the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite Migrated to a Netgate SG-1100 2019-02-03 EdgeRouter CNAME records Setup CNAME records 2017-10-03 Dyn DDNS on EdgeRouter Setup DynDNS 2017-04-25 DuckDNS on EdgeRouter Setup DuckDNS 2017-01-08 Ubiquiti EdgeRouter serial console settings Serial console settings 2016-11-29 Ubiquiti UniFi controller setup on Raspberry Pi 3 Install UniFi Controller 2016-08-30 EdgeRouter Lite Dnsmasq setup Setup dnsmasq 2016-06-13 EdgeRouter Lite software upgrade Firmware upgrade 2016-05-12 EdgeRouter Lite OpenVPN setup OpenVPN server setup 2016-04-29 Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite setup Initial setup Introduction For years, I’ve been using and loving my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. For about $100, you’re not going to find a router with more features. In fact, most of Ubiquiti’s offerings are a very good value for the money. However, in the past year or so, Ubiquiti has seemed to have some issues with what direction they want to take as a company: ...