Introduction I spend a lot of time on Reddit in r/devops, r/homelab, and r/selfhosted, where I always see different versions of the same question: It’s difficult to get hands-on experience in DevOps. What is a good beginner project? I’ve posted this answer to Reddit multiple times before, but this post will have more detail. Static site Build a static site. That’s the answer. Why A static site is a great beginner project because: ...

Introduction This post serves no real purpose other than to match SEO keywords for people searching for PCIe WiFi cards for Linux. My desktop is on the third floor of my house, unfortunately without wired internet. I’ve been using a PCIe 802.11n (WiFi 4) card since 2016 and realized it’s time to upgrade. TP-Link TL-WDN4800 Qualcomm Atheros AR9380 chipset 802.11a - 54Mbps 802.11b - 11Mbps 802.11g - 54Mbps 802.11n - 450Mbps (WiFi 4) WPA/WPA2 ...

Hey! Listen! This post is part of a series on 10" mini-racks. Check them all out! Date URL Part 2022-09-16 Homelab 10" mini-rack shelves Comparison of 10" shelves 2021-01-05 Homelab 10" mini-rack Initial post about mini-rack Introduction ⚠️ WARNING ⚠️ This is an image-heavy post (I have lazy-loading enabled, so images should only load as you scroll) I know that the imperial system of units is inferior to the metric system, but these are 10-inch racks, not 254mm racks 🤷‍♂️ For my measurements, I’ve converted fractions (8-11/16) to decimals (8.6875) For the past year-and-a-half, my network stack has lived in my 10-inch mini-rack (not on my countertop, obviously). ...

Hey! Listen! This post is part of a series on the DeskMini H470 as a hypervisor. Check them all out! Date URL Part 2022-09-07 Adding a ZFS mirror to Proxmox Add a ZFS mirror to Proxmox 2022-09-02 Adding data center SSDs to the DeskMini H470 Add 2x Intel D3-S4510 to the DeskMini H470 2021-06-23 ASRock DeskMini H470 as a compact hypervisor Initial post about DeskMini H470 Introduction In my last post, I added two Intel D3-S4510 960 SSDs to my ASRock DeskMini H470 running Proxmox. I also upgraded the firmware, as well as ran some basic tests on the drives. In this post, I’ll be creating a ZFS mirror and adding it to Proxmox. ...

Hey! Listen! This post is part of a series on the DeskMini H470 as a hypervisor. Check them all out! Date URL Part 2022-09-07 Adding a ZFS mirror to Proxmox Add a ZFS mirror to Proxmox 2022-09-02 Adding data center SSDs to the DeskMini H470 Add 2x Intel D3-S4510 to the DeskMini H470 2021-06-23 ASRock DeskMini H470 as a compact hypervisor Initial post about DeskMini H470 Introduction Last year, I setup the ASRock DeskMini H470 as a compact hypervisor running Proxmox. During setup, I only installed a single NVMe SSD. However, I specifically chose the DeskMini H470 because it had space for more drives, which I knew I would eventually want to make use of. Today is that day. ...

TL;DR I’m frustrated by Mozilla, but don’t see many alternative browsers that have such noble goals as Firefox. Introduction I have a confession: I tried really hard to quit Firefox, but I can’t. I’ve been using Firefox since the single-digit release days, and I’ve been publishing my Firefox config for five years now. In a recent experiment, I used Brave Browser exclusively for three months, but ended up moving back to Firefox. Here are my thoughts (i.e., a rant) on why I moved, why I moved back, and why I might not be done moving. ...

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. ...

Update: 2022-04-15 I typically average around 100 unique visitors to this site per day. Below is a screenshot from my Plausible analytics setup showing the traffic spike up to almost 14k unique visitors from HackerNews (and other sources). Update: 2022-04-12 I posted this article to that orange site and it blew up more than I expected. I reached #3 of the front page (screenshot below) and am officially on the top 10 list for 2022-04-11. When I migrated from WordPress to Hugo, I lost comments on this blog, but the HackerNews post has some really good discussion and recommendations that I highly encourage you to check out. ...

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. ...