Building my new business environment started with repurposing an old Dell R620 as a Proxmox host. I quickly noticed, however, that the information that showed up in the system’s iDRAC interface was… wrong.

Puppet is extremely useful, but has a number of annoying deficiencies – among them, the way it handles node configuration. External Node Classifiers Are A Thing, but you have to use something like Foreman to store and supply …

I’ve been making a number of changes in my local environment (more on that in a few days I think), and I ran across a problem that is, as far as I can tell, fairly undocumented.

My Terraforming efforts continue in my homelab, but Terraform alone isn’t enough. Some of my services require ongoing management, and I want to capture that configuration as code to make it reproducible when needed. Puppet is …

I’m currently in the process of modernizing my home lab environment. I decided to go with Terraform, and the first step was getting to where I can spin up a new host in my vsphere cluster just by adding a few lines in terraform. …

If you’ve ever set up DNS forwarding on a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter and have your own internal authoritative DNS servers, then you may have noticed that it doesn’t quite work right. If you look up the hostname of your router via the …

Many of my basic network services live on Raspberry Pi hosts. DNS, DHCP, my yum repository mirrors, my git server… These useful little machines make excellent utility hosts for simple tasks that don’t require much horsepower. But …

In my last post, I discussed using Zabbix to monitor varnish. I said it was easy, and that was mostly true — but it also missed one detail that made the situation a bit more complex. It has nothing to do with Zabbix or Varnish …

Yeah, it was an ugly day today. We got a few inches of rain (complete with wild tunderstorms) in just a couple of hours, and the beautiful river I live on has turned to mud as a result. A perfectly cruddy end to a perfectly cruddy …