Tiernan's Comms Closet: Recent Episodes
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If you’re considering using Cloudflare Wrap for specific machines on your network, you can easily install the Warp client directly on them. It supports various operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android. However, if you need to use it on devices that aren’t compatible with the client installation, for example, NAS Devices or Smart TVs, this tutorial may be helpful.
First, please note that this is not an officially supported option. Cloudflare might modify their configurations at some point, potentially causing this feature to break. You have been informed about this possibility.
What do you need:
- UDM Pro (it can work on any Ubiquiti Unifi gateways, but this is the one I have).
- Wireguard Configuration File Generator (WGCF). This tool will generate a Wireguard configuration file based on the Cloudflare settings.
- I’ve created a script that executes the following commands. It worked on my MacBook Pro, and it should also work on Windows or Linux.
First, install WGCF. I installed it by running
brew install wgcf
on my Mac Book Pro.
Next, run:
wgcf register
This will register a client on your machine. A wgcf-account.toml file will be left in your running folder. Next, run the script again.
wgcf generate
You’ll be left with a wgcf-profile.config file in your running folder. Open this file in a text editor to access the necessary details for your next steps.
Go to your Unifi Network Dashboard, click on “Settings,” and then select “VPN” and “VPN Client.” Click on “Create New” and choose “Wireguard” as the protocol. Then, change the “Setup” to “Manual.”
The configuration file you created earlier should resemble this:
[Interface]
PrivateKey = <PRIVATEKEY>
Address = <IPv4Address>, <IPV6Address>
DNS = 1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1, 2606:4700:4700::1111, 2606:4700:4700::1001
MTU = 1280
[Peer]
PublicKey = <ServerPublicKey>
AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0, ::/0
Endpoint = <ServerEndpoint>
Use the contents of PrivateKey to overwrite the existing Private Key. This will automatically fill in your Public Key. Next, set your Tunnel IP to the value listed for IPv4Address. Remove the trailing slash and use that in the Netmask (my Netmask was a /32). Server Address is the value listed as ServerEndpoint. Check the port and include it as well. The Public Server Key is ServerPublicKey. Finally, add your DNS settings for IPv4 in the configuration and click Apply Changes.
After a few seconds, the status should change to “Connected”.
Next, you need to configure the Policy-Based Routes. This is located under the routing section, specifically under the heading “Policy-Based Routes.”
Here, you can name the rule and decide whether you want to send all traffic or specific traffic.
For all traffic, you can select a specific device or the entire network. For instance, in this example, all traffic from my Guest network will be routed through Warp:
You can also set it to send traffic to specific destinations:
Fallback allows it to fail back to one of the other connections if the Warp connection fails.
Finally, click Add Entry at the bottom. Now, run some tests on that machine and see the traffic counts increase.
That is now it. You can select what devices or networks, or even what destinations you want to send over Cloudflare. Happy hunting.
Want to experience the classic Apple operating system on modern hardware? Emulating Mac OS 9 using QEMU is the way to go! This guide will guide you through the process of setting up Mac OS 9 in QEMU, from creating a virtual hard drive to installing the operating system. Let’s get started!
Prerequisites
Before you begin, make sure you have these things:
A computer that can run QEMU (macOS, Linux, or Windows).
A Mac OS 9 installation ISO (like Mac OS 9.2.2 Universal Install. Check Archive.org).
A version of QEMU with sound support (like qemu-screamer).
You should also know a bit about using the terminal.
Step 1: Install QEMU
Download and install a version of QEMU that supports PowerPC emulation. The qemu-screamer fork is recommended for better audio support.
Clone the repository:
``` git clone -b screamer https://github.com/mcayland/qemu qemu-screamer
cd qemu-screamer ``` Configure and compile:
``` ./configure --target-list="ppc-softmmu" --audio-drv-list="coreaudio" --enable-libusb --enable-kvm --enable-hvf --enable-cocoa
make ``` The compiled binary will be located in qemu-screamer/ppc-softmmu/qemu-system-ppc.
Step 2: Create a Virtual Hard Drive
Use the qemu-img tool to create a virtual hard drive for Mac OS 9:
./qemu-img create -f qcow2 macos9.img 2G
Replace 2G with your desired size if needed. Mac OS 9 does not require much space, so 2 GB is generally sufficient.
Step 3: Prepare the Installation Media
Ensure you have a bootable ISO of Mac OS 9. If you do not have one, download it from resources like “Mac OS 9 Lives.” Place the ISO in an accessible directory on your system.
Step 4: Start QEMU and Begin Installation
Run QEMU with the following command to boot into the Mac OS 9 installer:
``` ./qemu-system-ppc \
-L pc-bios \
-cpu g4 \
-M mac99,via=pmu \
-m 512 \
-hda macos9.img \
-cdrom "/path/to/Mac_OS_9.iso” \
-boot d \
-g 1024x768x32 \
-device usb-mouse \
-device usb-kbd ``` Explanation of key flags:
-cpu g4: Emulates a G4 processor.
-M mac99,via=pmu: Sets the machine type to emulate a PowerMac G4.
-m 512: Allocates 512 MB of RAM.
-hda macos9.img: Specifies the virtual hard drive.
-cdrom: Points to your Mac OS 9 installation ISO. Have a look on archive.org for the ISO.
-boot d: Boots from the CD-ROM.
Step 5: Initialize and Install Mac OS 9
Once QEMU boots, open “Drive Setup” from the Utilities folder.
Select the uninitialized disk and click “Initialize.”
Choose “Mac OS Extended” as the file system and proceed.
After initializing, return to the installer and follow on-screen instructions to install Mac OS 9 onto your virtual hard drive.
The installation process typically takes about 7–10 minutes.
Step 6: Boot into Mac OS 9
After installation is complete:
Shut down QEMU.
Modify the boot command to boot from the hard drive instead of the CD-ROM:
``` ./qemu-system-ppc \
-L pc-bios \
-cpu g4 \
-M mac99,via=pmu \
-m 512 \
-hda macos9.img \
-boot c \
-g 1024x768x32 \
-device usb-mouse \
-device usb-kbd
``` Start QEMU again, and it should boot into your newly installed Mac OS 9 environment.
Optional: Enable Audio Support
If using qemu-screamer, audio can be enabled by ensuring CoreAudio is configured during compilation (–audio-drv-list=”coreaudio”). This setup allows sound output within Mac OS 9.
Tips and Troubleshooting
Backup Your Disk Image: After installation, back up your virtual hard drive (macos9.img) to avoid reinstalling if issues arise.
Adjust RAM: While Mac OS 9 can run on as little as 40 MB of RAM, allocating at least 512 MB ensures smoother performance.
Networking: Add networking support with flags like -netdev user,id=mynet and -device sungem,netdev=mynet.
By following these steps, you’ll have a fully functional emulation of Mac OS 9 running on QEMU! Enjoy exploring this nostalgic operating system.
Back in May, VMware announced that VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro would be free for non-commercial use. This was fantastic news for non-commercial users. However, a few days ago, they made an even better announcement: the free edition is now available to all users, including commercial users. While you can still purchase a license if you require support, the free version functions just as well, albeit without any support.
It appears that they are discontinuing Workstation Player and Fusion Player, as the functionality they offered is now included in the free version of Workstation and Fusion.
In my previous post, I mentioned that Windows Server 2025 had gained general availability, but I had no information about the ARM64 version. It appears that 4sysops has found a workaround. You can download an ARM version of Windows 2025 from uupdump.net. Since I have a few M1/M2 Macs lying around, I’ll try downloading it and see if it works on them. I’m curious to know how long it would take someone to get this running on a Raspberry Pi. I believe they would make excellent little AD/DNS/DHCP servers.
Microsoft has just released Windows Server 2025 and System Center 2025 in General Availability. You can find more information on the Microsoft Release status site.
Current status as of November 1, 2024
Windows Server 2025 is now generally available. It delivers security advancements and new hybrid cloud capabilities in a high performing, AI-capable platform. Windows Server 2025 is Microsoft’s latest Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release for Windows Server. To download a free 180-day evaluation, visit the Microsoft Evaluation Center.
To learn more about Windows Server’s Lifecycle Policy, see the Windows Server 2025 lifecycle article.
One aspect that hasn’t been discussed yet is the release of ARM64 support. While there were some ARM64 releases during the testing phase in the insiders group, there’s no official word on the GA versions yet. Additionally, here are the minimum requirements for CPUs. (From NeoWin).
The GodBoxV3, equipped with its first-generation Xeon SP processor, requires an upgrade to transition to Server 2025. Hmmm….
I needed to create a few Ubuntu VMs for a Kubernetes cluster for testing, and wanted to make this as easy as possible using Proxmox and some (minor) automation… Here is what I have done:
First, Download the base image:
wget https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/jammy/current/jammy-server-cloudimg-amd64.img
Then tweak the image… I’m using my apt-cacher-ng proxy here so I set the proxy for all VMs. you can remove it or tweak it as required. If you want to remove it, remove the append-line option. I am also installing qemu-guest-agent here. You can add extra items at this point if you want.
sudo virt-customize -a jammy-server-cloudimg-amd64.img --install qemu-guest-agent --append-line '/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00proxy:Acquire::http { Proxy "http://10.244.71.182:3142"; };'
Sysprep the image
resets it to the default stage. If you don't do this, and clone the machine 2 or 3 times, they all get the same machine ID and IP address… [Note: This is not fully working for me… See below where I make changes to machine ID… ]
sudo virt-sysprep -a jammy-server-cloudimg-amd64.img
Create the template. I used ID 9000 and set a name. You can change this. Also, I have mind tagged with VLAN 72 (my Kubernetes VLAN). Change or remove as required. Also, I set the disk size to add 50Gb. Any mention of godboxv2-tank should be changed to your storage name…
sudo qm create 9000 --name "ubuntu-2204-cloudinit-template" --memory 4096 --cores 2 --net0 virtio,bridge=vmbr0,tag=72
sudo qm importdisk 9000 jammy-server-cloudimg-amd64.img godboxv2-tank
sudo qm set 9000 --scsihw virtio-scsi-pci --scsi0 godboxv2-tank:vm-9000-disk-0
sudo qm set 9000 --boot c --bootdisk scsi0
sudo qm disk resize 9000 scsi0 +50G
sudo qm set 9000 --ide2 godboxv2-tank:cloudinit
sudo qm set 9000 --serial0 socket --vga serial0
sudo qm set 9000 --agent enabled=1
sudo qm template 9000
Clone the VM into a new VM.
sudo qm clone 9000 2001 --name k8s-01
sudo qm set 2001 --sshkey godboxv3.pub
sudo qm set 2001 --memory 4096
sudo qm set 2001 --ciuser tiernano
sudo qm set 2001 --ipconfig0 ip=dhcp
Change tiernano and godboxv3.pub to your settings. change names and memory as required.
As mentioned above, I am still having the issue with IPs being shared… to fix this, log into the boxes and run the following:
echo -n >/etc/machine-id
rm /var/lib/dbus/machine-id
ln -s /etc/machine-id /var/lib/dbus/machine-id
and then reboot. The problem should now be solved.
I am in the middle of a fairly large network upgrade for the CloudShed. I have bought 2 Ubiquiti Unifi Hi-Capacity Aggregration Switch, a 24 Port SWitch Pro POE, a Switch Enterprise 8 PoE, a couple of U7 Pro Access Points and a U6 In-wall.
The 2 Aggregation Switches have 4 25Gb ports on them, along with 28 10Gb ports. 2 of the 25Gbs are going to be linked between the house and the CloudShed. The U6 InWall is going into the office, the 2 U7 Pros are in the house already, powered by the Switch Enterprise 8 Poe (2.5Gb enternet on that!) and the 24 port Poe Switch will replace my older 16 port one, which does not have 10Gb ethernet. More stuff on this coming when I get more time to install it all…
About a month ago, I bought a 2022 iPad Pro 11 inch (4th gen) used for about 800 EUR (Which, given they are still for sale on Apple’s site for nearly double that (mine is a 256Gb model with Cellular) I think I got a good deal. I also got my hands on the Keyboard Folio, which is both a good thing, especially for writing stuff like this, but also a bit of a pain (the weight of it adds to the iPad and the fact that you need to remove it from the iPad to use it as a tablet is a pain). I also got my hands on a 2nd Gen Pencil, along with a USB C hub.
iPad Pro writing this postThe main reason I got this was for photo and video work. I shoot on both my iPhone 15 Pro Max and my Canon R5. When out shooting on the R5, I like to be able to plug in an SD or CF Express reader, download the images into Lightroom and be able to view them on the larger screen. Given the iPad is connected over 5G, it can always sync to the internet all the time. And, if I am near my car, which I usually am, I can use the WiFi in the car to upload stuff to the cloud too using the Mikrotik Router in the boot of the car… The one thing I have not fully tried out yet is video editing… I am still doing video editing on my Mac Book Pro at home. Maybe I will try it on the iPad soon. Speaking of videos, check out some of the videos I have on my YouTube channel. And, by the way, this was fully edited and written on the iPad Pro…
Well, it’s Prime Day 2023, so I have been busy ordering some stuff, and, well, given everyone and their mother is doing posts on Prime Day stuff, I thought I would add my list of interesting things, including some of the things I bought. PS: all links are affiliate links and were found in the […]
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This site is hosted on my own ASN on AS204994. More details about that over there. I also use Vultr for transit services and HostUs for LIR Services. Check them out. You can also check some of the gear I use on a daily basis over on kit.co/tiernano. Looking for a Backup Option? Check out Backblaze and get a month free.
I don't know… once way to find out… [Updated] YUP! 😛
The post Do sub-pages show up correctly? first appeared on Tiernan's Comms Closet.
This site is hosted on my own ASN on AS204994. More details about that over there. I also use Vultr for transit services and HostUs for LIR Services. Check them out. You can also check some of the gear I use on a daily basis over on kit.co/tiernano. Looking for a Backup Option? Check out Backblaze and get a month free.
I think I have WordPress linked with Notion… It's using WPSync for Notion and seems to work… this could be interesting… Still trying to figure out tags though…
The post Testing WordPress and Notion first appeared on Tiernan's Comms Closet.
This site is hosted on my own ASN on AS204994. More details about that over there. I also use Vultr for transit services and HostUs for LIR Services. Check them out. You can also check some of the gear I use on a daily basis over on kit.co/tiernano. Looking for a Backup Option? Check out Backblaze and get a month free.
It’s been a while… So, for Day 61 of #100daysofhomelab, I thought I should write up how to swap a disk in a Hetzner Dedicated Machine.
I have a dedicated server I rent from Hetzner in Germany. It has a Xeon E5-1650 V2 processor (6 cores, 12 threads, 3.5Gz base, 3.9Gz turbo), 128Gb RAM, and a pretty impressive 15 6Tb HDD. All drives are hooked to a Mega RAID controller, but because I am running ProxMox, I left it in JBOD mode and set up the 15 drives in RAIDZ-2. All 15 drives are in a single pool (probably not ideal, but it works for me). Every now and again, I get a message from ProxMox telling me about bad blocks… and every time it happens, I have to remember what to do to find the bad drive, report it to Hetzner, wait for them to replace the drive and then add it back to the pool… Today, it happened, so I thought I better document it, to help future me, and hopefully someone else out there…
First, we need to find the drive in question. Usually, I’m my alerts, I get the Serial number of the drive causing problems. So, I ran the following command:
megacli -PDList -aAll | egrep "Enclosure Device ID:|Slot Number:|Inquiry Data:|Error Count:|state"
This gives me a full list of drives along with the Slot Number (needed when sending to Hetzner) and the Serial Number. the data output starts with the “Enclosure Device ID:” so when you find the Serial number, look above it for the Slot Number… so, my issue is with the disk in Slot 10. I open a support ticket with Hetzner requesting a replacement disk. It can take an hour or more for this, but sometimes faster. Depends on their load…
Once you get a confirmation that the disk is done, you now need to swap it into the zpool.
first, we must check if the new drive is set up correctly. Run the following:
megacli -PDList -a0 | grep Firmware
We are looking for “Firmware status: Online, Spun Up”. If we have anything marked as configured, we need to run the following:
megacli -CfgForeign -Scan -a0
This shows us any foreign configurations. If that’s more than 0, we run:
megacli -CfgForeign -Clear -a0
This clears out that configuration. Next, we need the Enclosure ID and Slot number for the new drive from:
megacli -PDList -aAll | egrep "Enclosure Device ID:|Slot Number:|Inquiry Data:|Error Count:|state"
cause we need to run:
megacli -PDMakeGood -PhysDrv [<enclosure>:<slot>] -a0
Finally, run:
megacli -CfgEachDskRaid0 WB RA Direct CachedBadBBU -a0
Note: If that fails with a message about cache data, you may need to run:
megacli -DiscardPreservedCache -L"10" -a0
This will clear the cache and then you can run the CfgEachDskRaid0. This will mark all new disks as JBOD disks… used for ZFS. If you have something different, check the docs from Hetzner below.
Next, we need to swap disks in ZFS. Run
zpool status
to get the info about the missing disks. the missing disk will show as unavailable. Next, find the ID of the disk that was added.
cd /dev/disk/by-id/
ls
find the new disk (usually wont have any partitions on it). Now, its a matter of running the following:
zpool replace rpool /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-3600605b008f498802aa37da51674ea7e-part3 /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x600605b008f498802b2a3a683752e088
swap the scsi-36xxx and wwn-0x6xxx parts for the ones you found and rpool with your ZFS pool name.
finally, run
zpool status
to see the status, run:
zpool status -v -1
shows you the status with more info and refreshes every second. ZFS is now running in the background and resilvering the drives and swapping out the old ones. since the old one is missing, it will wait till the new drive is sorted then remove the old one. This can take some time, depending on your disks and data size.
Hopefully, this helps someone!
Some links for info:
LSI RAID Controller – Hetzner Docs
The post Day 61 of #100daysofhomelab – swapping disks in a Hetzner Dedicated Machine first appeared on Tiernan's Comms Closet.
---This site is hosted on my own ASN on AS204994. More details about that over there. I also use Vultr for transit services and HostUs for LIR Services. Check them out. You can also check some of the gear I use on a daily basis over on kit.co/tiernano. Looking for a Backup Option? Check out Backblaze and get a month free.
Looks like there is a new release for ESXi 8.0. Seems to be mostly a DPU patch. Anyone running ESXi with DPUs might need to look into this…
- VMware ESXi 8.0c Release Notes
- VMware ESXi 8.0 Patch History (v-front.de)
The post ESXi 8.0c Release first appeared on Tiernan's Comms Closet.
---This site is hosted on my own ASN on AS204994. More details about that over there. I also use Vultr for transit services and HostUs for LIR Services. Check them out. You can also check some of the gear I use on a daily basis over on kit.co/tiernano. Looking for a Backup Option? Check out Backblaze and get a month free.
Day 60 of #100daysofhomelab and I have been sick for most of the last 2 weeks, so that’s why I haven’t been posting much… Today is going to be links only too…
- Updates on the 3CX Security Alert for Electron Windows App – and the next few links are all about it… I use 3CX at home… Luckily I don’t use the desktop app (Phone app and their PWA app, but not the desktop one). If you do, start reading!
- 3CX VoIP Software Compromise & Supply Chain Threats (huntress.com)
- // 2023-03-29 // SITUATIONAL AWARENESS // CrowdStrike Tracking Active Intrusion Campaign Targeting 3CX Customers // : crowdstrike (reddit.com)
- Ironing out (the macOS details) of a Smooth Operator Objective-See’s Blog
- Tailscale Funnel now available in beta · Tailscale
- ASRock Rack GENOAD8UD-2T/X550 Genoa Motherboard Review (servethehome.com)
- From IP packets to HTTP: the many faces of our Oxy framework (cloudflare.com)
The post Day 60 of #100daysofhomelab first appeared on Tiernan's Comms Closet.
---This site is hosted on my own ASN on AS204994. More details about that over there. I also use Vultr for transit services and HostUs for LIR Services. Check them out. You can also check some of the gear I use on a daily basis over on kit.co/tiernano. Looking for a Backup Option? Check out Backblaze and get a month free.
Day 59 of #100daysofhomelab and Proxmox released 7.4 of their Virtual Environment. I have not upgraded any of my machines to it, just yet, but that’s the plan for the weekend. Other than that, some links:
- The Ultimate Cheap Fanless 2.5GbE Switch Mega Round-Up (servethehome.com)
- Proxmox VE 7.4 Released with Dark Mode Support (servethehome.com)
- Framework’s Laptop 16 is a modular, upgradeable gaming laptop | Engadget
- Framework brings updated Intel and AMD chips to its modular laptop | Engadget
- The Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel is the latest to be taken over by hackers – Neowin
The post Day 59 of #100daysofhomelab – Proxmox Updates, LTT Hacked, New Framework Laptops first appeared on Tiernan's Comms Closet.
---This site is hosted on my own ASN on AS204994. More details about that over there. I also use Vultr for transit services and HostUs for LIR Services. Check them out. You can also check some of the gear I use on a daily basis over on kit.co/tiernano. Looking for a Backup Option? Check out Backblaze and get a month free.
Day 58 of #100daysofhomelab and today is mostly a retrospective of what I did over the last few days, with some links thrown in for good measure…
Given I am going to keep GodBoxV3 running Windows Server 2022 for the foreseeable future, I installed Veeam Availability Suite (through their NFR program) and got it to backup up my Hyper-V VMs, along with my ESXi VMs to both local and Backblaze B2 storage. So far, so good.
Also, Ubiquiti released Unifi OS 3.0 for the UDM Pro, which I upgraded this morning. Links for that are below. Some nice bits in here, like:
- Added Wireguard VPN Server support.
- Added VPN Client Routing.
- Added Ad-blocking feature.
- Added support for OpenVPN tunnel in Traffic Routes.
- Allow adding multiple VPN Clients.
the 2.5 release OS had the VPN Client option, but ALL traffic went over the VPN, whether you wanted it to or not. This release gives you the option to say that traffic from a given host, network or even traffic to a given IP or range, goes over the VPN link. The Ad Block feature is nice too, but I have not tried it yet (still using PiHole for the moment) and the Wireguard VPN option is going to be VERY handy. More testing coming soon…
Anyway, on to the links.
- NVIDIA GTC 2023 Keynote Product Announcements (servethehome.com)
- NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF 20GB Low Profile Double-Width Workstation GPU (servethehome.com)
- UniFi OS – Dream Machines 3.0.19 | Ubiquiti Community – UDM Pro finally gets to OS 3.0!
The post Day 58 of #100daysofhomelab first appeared on Tiernan's Comms Closet.
---This site is hosted on my own ASN on AS204994. More details about that over there. I also use Vultr for transit services and HostUs for LIR Services. Check them out. You can also check some of the gear I use on a daily basis over on kit.co/tiernano. Looking for a Backup Option? Check out Backblaze and get a month free.
Day 57 of #100daysofhomelab and its a link dump for today:
- Using DPUs Hands-on Lab with the NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU and VMware vSphere Demo (servethehome.com)
- grafolean/grafolean: Easy to use monitoring system (github.com)
- ONE HUNDRED GIGABIT – MiktroTik CRS504-4XQ-I9 – YouTube
- I Bought the Last One Apple Ever Made… – YouTube – LTT tests out the Apple XServe
Day 56 of #100daysofhomelab and I managed to fix some stuff with my TrueNAS box. There was lots of messing when it came to permissions, but it works now. Some speeds are below. Not quite getting the speeds I was expecting, but there I have not tweaked anything, yet… This is going from my MacBook Pro with a 10Gb adapter. The reads are quite good, but the writes… well, the HDDs are FASTER than the NVMe… No idea why… I did get a new card to add another 4 NVMe drives in… We’ll see what happens when that gets built.
NVMe drive speedSpinning Disk SpeedsAnd now, the links:
- Newbie firm plans $2,800 add-in card that holds up to 21 PCIe 4.0 SSDs, 168TB | Ars Technica
- Apex Storage X21 NVMe AIC (webflow.io) – product from above article…
- AMD EPYC Embedded 9004 Series Launched (servethehome.com)
Day 55 of #100daysofhomelab and it’s going to mostly link dump today… Still working on my TrueNAS stuff, hopefully, I can get a couple of blog posts about it soon enough… Anyway, on to the links.
- Uploading Large Files with AzCopy (markheath.net)
- SQL Server 2022: Intel® QuickAssist Technology overview – Microsoft SQL Server Blog
- tailscale/cpc: a copy tool (github.com)
- Embed Funnel in your App (tailscale.dev)
- Globally distributed Elixir over Tailscale · Richard Taylor
- Silicon Valley Bank Shutdown: Implications for Startups and VCs | Fintech Friday
- pgrok/pgrok: Poor man’s ngrok – a multi-tenant HTTP reverse tunnel solution through SSH remote port forwarding (github.com)
- US regulators bail out SVB customers, who can access all their money Monday | CNN Business
Day 54 of #100daysofhomelab and it’s going to be a very quick one… My head is wrecked with TrueNAS… Swapped TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD) to TrueNAS Scale (Linux). Trying to get Resilio Sync to work on it, but getting permissions issues… It’s after 2 am here, so giving up for the moment, but hopefully, I can figure it out tomorrow… On a different note, I ordered a load of storage upgrades (Another Hyper M.2 x16 card, some new NVMe drives, and some other stuff) for GodBoxV3… More details soon…
Day 53 of #100daysofhomelab and It’s been a busy week… ish… I’ve been battling with Vertigo on and off this week, so haven’t don’t a lot. I did, however, fix some issues with the network, set up a proper failover WAN connection using SmoothWAN and my Quad 2.5Gb Box, and have started making major changes to GodBoxV3.
Originally, GodBoxV3 had all spinning disks (8 8Tb drives shucked from WD My Book 8TBs or 8TB Seagate IronWolf) in a single RAID 5 pool in Windows Storage Spaces. Then the NVMe drives were a second pool (5 of them, 4 Force MP510 480Gb NVMe SSDs on a Hyper M.2 x16 card and a 5th unbranded one of a 1X PCI-E add-in card) and a third pool of 2 960Gb IronWolf SSDs.
I deleted the RAID5 and NVMe arrays, and now, for testing, I have spun up a TrueNAS Core VM on the 2 SSDs and passed the NVMe and HDDs into that VM. Windows can still “see” them, but they are marked as offline, but Hard Disk Sentinel and CrystalDiskInfo can both see the SMART status of them (TrueNAS cant, weirdly…). Then, I have 7 of the 8 drives added to a single pool (one is failing so I left it out, this is for testing currently, anyway) and then the 5 NVMes are added to a second pool (the plan is to use the 4 Force MP510s or replacement drives as a single pool, then the other NVMe (or maybe even 2) as a Cache or Log for the Spinning disk pool).
So far, doesn’t matter if I am using the NVMe or HDD pool, but speeds from my Mac (with a 10Gb Thunderbolt adapter) are around the same… Might be a config issue, might be the odd NVNe drive slowing the rest down… but I am happy with the speeds so far… I have seen 3-400Mb/s Writes and 900+ Reads on both NVMe and HDD… Most of that is probably cached… the VM has 64Gb RAM given to it, and the test file was only 5Gb (BlackMagic Disk Speed Test). More testing is required though.
A couple of days back, I started thinking about archiving and backup software. I kind of have backups “sorted”, with my MacBook Pro using BackBlaze to backup to the cloud, Time Machine backing it up to my Synology, my VMs on Proxmox being backed up to Proxmox Backup Server off-site, my Synology and QNAPs being backup to B2 and Hetzner and some other bits and bobs… But for the Archiving stuff, I am not really set up… So, I went looking for archiving software. Couldn’t find anything, so asked on r/DataHoarder. Still no options, at the time of posting, but someone did reply with the idea of using DVDs (or Blu Rays) for ZFS...
Ok, that’s just crazy, but in a kind of a good way… kind of like the floppy RAID stuff I have seen… It does help with the storage of data, plus allows for potential loss of data… but it needs some automation to get it fully perfect…
Assuming you are using this for archiving, you could automate building 5 ISOs, just shy of 100Gb each, once a month, create ZFS ZRAID 2 or 3 (depending on how paranoid you are) and then write your data to it. ZRAID lets you lose 1 disk, giving you around 400GB of usage. Z2 brings that up to 2 losable disks, and 300Gb and Z3 is 3 disks and 200GB. I think Z2 would be your best bet, especially if you are using something like MDisk and are storing them safely.
Once finished, unmount and send an email saying you need to write the ISOs to disk. Label each disk with a unique serial number (this is where the archiving software would be handy) plus the set details and number (so, March 2023 Disk 1/5).
If you need something from that backup you stick it in the drives… You can do it with multiple drives, so with 5 disks and ZRAID, you need to mount a minimum of 4 of them. ZRAID2 needs 3 and ZRAID3 needs a minimum of 2… Ideally, you would want 5 of them, allowing you to check all disks (ZFS Scrub) and then get your files off.
A year of archiving would require 5 drives (say 100 quid a pop, USB makes things easier... Internal is possibly cheaper) and 60 disks (I Found 25 100Gb MDisks disks on Amazon for around 500 EUR) costing a total of maybe 2k, with 15 extra disks…
Follow-up questions:
- Does ZFS allow the mounting of read-only?
- Could you do this with Rewritable BluRay disks? Could they be mounted directly and written to? Leave them in the drives for the month, let writes do their thing and then archive them once a month? It’s archived, so it doesn’t need to be fast…
Day 52 of #100daysofhomelab and I have been out of the lab most of the day. Still looking through all the docker containers on docker box 1, which has been running for many years now, and trying to figure out how to move everything is going to be fun… looks like I have an iSCSI volume added to the box. It’s shared between a few docker containers… then there are NFS mounts too… This might take longer than expected… So… more digging through YAML…
- Lenovo ThinkEdge SE10 and SE10-I Launched for Low Power Fanless Edge (servethehome.com)
- TrueNAS Mini R Released and TrueNAS Scale 22.12.1 (servethehome.com)
- UniFi Protect Application 2.7.31 | Ubiquiti Community – The last release caused problems with my G4 Doorbell… the mechanical chime stopped working. This fixes that issue…
- How Well Does the M2 Pro Mac mini Handle Video? | Fstoppers
- Found some photos of my old 2012 BMW 535D (EU spec, so 3l twin turbo straight 6 with 300+ BHP!). decided to post them to my Smugmug site. I loved that car… Pity, it’s gone now…
Day 51 of #100daysofhomelab and I am planning my move of some of my Docker instances in the house to new machines… GodBoxV3 is currently running Windows Server 2022 with a couple of HyperV VMs on it. One runs docker containers and the other USIP from Ubiquiti for managing my EdgeSwitches. I am trying to move these VMs off that machine and do a clean-up, and the plan is to either install Proxmox with TrueNAS as a VM with disks passed directly into it, plus some other VMs or TrueNAS direct with VMs on there… Suggestions? Anyway, as part of the clean-up, I put my custom WordPress Container up on GitHub and it builds new builds nightly. The move is going to be fun, so my weekend will be busy… So, other than that, some links.
- ASRock Rack W680D4U-2L2T/G5 Motherboard Review An Intel Core Server Platform (servethehome.com)
- What is OCuLink? – Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat (fosketts.net)
- RISC-V Business: Testing StarFive’s VisionFive 2 SBC | Jeff Geerling
- Deploying Incredible PBX 2027 with Microsoft Windows 11 – Nerd Vittles
- Tailscale February newsletter · Tailscale
- Exploring the Tailscale-Traefik Integration | Traefik Labs
- Connecting To A Third-Party Network From Azure Using NAT | Aidan Finn, IT Pro
Day 50 of #100daysofhomelab (this was stuck in a draft folder, so this is a couple of weeks old… I decided to recycle this as day 50, but it was originally day 37 or something…).
Just about 13 days ago: After running ZFS on my Mac for a few hours, I removed it and installed a trial of the SoftRAID software… I am not sure what was going on, but with ZFS installed, my machine just kept crashing… less than an hour and bang… So, I installed SoftRAID, and the speed ok… Not massive speeds, but not 100% sure I am using the right cables… More testing with cables soon…But in reality, this is software RAID 5 over 5 spinning disks. 270Mb/s read ain’t bad… 115Mb/s write ain’t great, but it’s RAID 5…
Cut to today: The trial of SoftRaid is just about up, and I am not sure I am going to buy it… I have been thinking of installing Proxmox or TrueNAS on GodBoxV3, which already has 8 8Tb Spinning drives, 7 NVMe drives (2 in RAID 0 for boot, and 4 in RAID 5 (ish, Windows Storage Spaces) one not usable for some reason, along with 2 960Gb SSDs). If I use the 5-bay enclosure with GodBoxV3, I can use that as one pool (External) the 8 Spinning disks inside as a second pool, the MVMEs as a third, and the SSDs either as a cache to the 8 internal disks, or possibly a more different pool… But this is something I am still thinking about… Anyway, links to random stuff are below…
- Supermicro X12SDV-4C-SP6F Review 25GbE and Intel Xeon D-1718T (servethehome.com)
- GitHub – dgibbs64/ansible-role-landscape_client: An Ansible role to configure Canonical Landscape Client on Ubuntu.
- bp2008/pingtracer: Ping Tracer continuously pings each network host between your computer and a given destination, helping identify the source of connectivity problems. (github.com)
- SmoothWAN thinking of using this for my backup link on my UDM Pro…
- Marvell Teralynx 10 Announced for 51.2T 800GbE Switching (servethehome.com)
Day 49 of #100daysofhomelab, and I missed this yesterday, but it’s only going to be a link dump… And todays link dump is mostly Mikrotik gear! Some of these are a little cringy (looking at your Solid Rack video) But hilarious nonetheless! Some of these are so new, they don’t even seem to have product pages, just videos announcing them…
- MikroTik product news: CRS504-4XQ-OUT – YouTube
- MikroTik product news: CRS510-8XS-2XQ-IN – YouTube
- WOW, a SOLID RACK! – YouTube
- MikroTik for… kids? (hAP mini throwback) – YouTube
- MikroTik Product show reel – YouTube
Day 48 of #100daysofhomelab and I have been out of commission for the last couple of days… Havnt been well… cold and flu-like symptoms, but luckily, not Covid… Haven’t done a major amount, so it’s mostly links for today, but I did try a few projects and installed them. Links for those are below.
- Linux 6.2: The first mainstream Linux kernel for Apple M1 chips arrives | ZDNET
- UniFi OS – Dream Machines 2.5.16 | Ubiquiti Community
- AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Linux Performance Review – Phoronix
- paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx: A community-supported supercharged version of paperless: scan, index and archive all your physical documents (github.com) I’ve been using this for scanning and archiving papers and PDF invoices that get sent to me. Trying to get it more automated, but working well so far.
- ytti/oxidized: Oxidized is a network device configuration backup tool. It’s a RANCID replacement! (github.com) Using this to back up my Mikrotik configs. It is meant to work with EdgeSwitches, but so far, just gets an error when running… More digging is required.
Day 47 of #100daysofhomelab and i have missed a few days due to, well, a mix of laziness and being busy… I was working from my new home office today… still need to get some cabling and other stuff sorted, but we are getting close… nearly a year since it was installed! More on that at a later stage… for today, some links.
- Broadcom Stingray PS225-H16 Dual 25GbE DPU Photoshoot (servethehome.com)
- L3HW Firewall Offloading – Doesn’t Offload Inter-VLAN traffic – MikroTik
- AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa Under-the-Lid – ServeTheHome
- Fortinet Issues Patches for 40 Flaws Affecting FortiWeb, FortiOS, FortiNAC, and FortiProxy (thehackernews.com)
- Twitter Limits SMS-Based 2-Factor Authentication to Blue Subscribers Only (thehackernews.com)
- Critical RCE Vulnerability Discovered in ClamAV Open Source Antivirus Software (thehackernews.com)
Day 46 of #100daysofhomelab and I haven’t had much time to work on the homelab this weekend, but have had some time using it, somewhat indirectly… Plex, Netflix and Disney Plus streaming, etc. Internet is more stable (but not 100%… more messing on that part soon) and the RB5009 is definitely more stable (IPv6 BGP is currently off, and only using 5 of my 14ish BGP sessions I could use… I think 1Gb RAM is struggling, or my filters are wrong… Hopefully, it’s a filter thing, that way I can sort it out without new hardware.
Day 45 (little late) of #100daysofhomelab, and still quite busy with $DayJob stuff… Mostly monitoring of the network and the like… Some links are below:
- How to Set Up a 24/7 Livestream Powered by Starlink – Speedify
- How To Boost Starlink Internet with Two Additional Connections – Speedify
- Microsoft to support Windows 11 on Apple M1 and M2 Macs through Parallels partnership – The Verge
- Announcing pricing updates and more flexible payment options for Google Workspace | Google Workspace Blog – price increases if you pay monthly…
- Frebniis: New Malware Abuses Microsoft IIS Feature to Establish Backdoor | Symantec Enterprise Blogs (security.com)
- Reducing Tailscale’s binary size on macOS · Tailscale
- 4.0.0 — Homebrew
Day 44 of #100daysofhomelab and still quite busy with $DayJob… so some links below.
- Intel Launches Xeon W-3400 and W-2400 Processors For Workstations: Up to 56 Cores and 112 PCIe 5.0 Lanes (anandtech.com)
- Tiernan on Twitter: “RT @ZeroTier: ZeroTier 1.10.3 is now available. This release includes low bandwidth mode, a duplicate path bug fix, and OIDC improvements.…” / Twitter
- swarmlet/swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service that enables easy swarm deployments, load balancing, automatic SSL, metrics, analytics and more. (github.com
Also, I have been fiddling with some JQ and Zerotier-CLI commands… Not finished, but working on trying to get some data out of the CLI… I have a GitHub Gist with some details… I plan on adding to it over time.
Day 43 of #100daysofhomelab and I missed yesterday, but instead of skipping numbers, I am just not… I have been up to my eyes with $DayJob so not a major amount of work… But a couple of links for the day:
- VMware ESXi 8.0 Patch History (v-front.de) – looks like there is a new patch for ESXi 8. This page has an RSS Feed I subscribe to and they even include the CLI params to update.
- Veeam 12 has been released. The release notes (PDF) have the full details. Downloading the community edition to try it out…
- Geekbench 6 Launched Big Benchmark Updates We Try It (servethehome.com)
- LibreNMS – looking at replacing Observium…
That is it for today…
Day 42 of #100daysofhomelab and I spent way too many hours last night messing with MAAS. It all started with a Techno Tim Video I posted back on Day 25. I started messing with it last night around 11 pm or so, and then I realized it was 4 AM this morning… So, link drop for today:
- MAAS | How to install MAAS
- MAAS | Power management reference
- Building Windows Images for MaaS. MaaS (Metal-As-A-Service) is… | by Ben Alton | Silicon Barn | The Official Blog From Multiplay’s Game Server Hosting Specialist
- User: Fearedbliss/Installing Gentoo Linux On ZFS – Gentoo Wiki
Going to be a very quick update here. Things are a little more stable at the moment. I figured out why my FTTH connection was acting up… the VM I moved it too had the default free 1Mb/s license for RouterOS… After moving my unlimited CHR license over, things have gotten better. screenshots over on my mastodon instance:
So, today, not doing much other than monitoring… I am taking a day of rest and will be back tomorrow…
Day 40 of #100daysofhomelab and the internet is a little more stable… Still not 100%, but “stable”. Speed test results have dropped, as you can see in the graph below, but weirdly, ping times are a little better…
Download speeds. The swap over happened around the 8th Feb, 9th was pretty much a wash, 10th things got a bit better…
Upload Speeds. less spikey upload speeds, but also less upload speed…
ping times went from around 38-40ms to around 28-30ms…
I currently have Observium watching the traffic on the routers, and all logs are being written to an ELK stack. Not correctly (links below on how it should work, but I don’t have it fully working… yet) but they are being logged nonetheless.
- OpenVPN in LXC – Proxmox VE Need to install Zerotier on an LXC container on proxmox. This is how to get it working.
- Push logs and data into elasticsearch – Part 1 NGINX (archyslife.blogspot.com)
- Push logs and data into elasticsearch – Part 2 Mikrotik Logs (archyslife.blogspot.com)
- Push logs and data into elasticsearch – Part 3 enrich your data with GeoIP (archyslife.blogspot.com)
- How To Install Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (Elastic Stack) on Ubuntu 22.04 | DigitalOcean
this post is for day 38 and 39 of #100daysofhomelab… and i have finally moved over to my #RB5009… and, well, it has not gone so well… It has rebooted a few times due to memory issues (too many BGP tables being held, so I shut a few down to start with… some cleanup needed there), then the internet connections are a little unstable, and, well, in the last 48 hours, I have spent more time on LTE than on proper internet… It does seem to be working (ish…) now, but not as fast as it was. I am just using the #Zerotier link, so the #Wireguard links are currently off… Anyway, below are some links… I hope to make things work better tomorrow… And i also hope to have a better write up soon too…
- NVIDIA A16 with 4x Ampere 16GB GPUs Onboard Quick Look (servethehome.com)
- How I Use Apple’s Vision APIs and OpenAI to Automate Nutrition Label Reading | Marcus Schappi
- Welcome to Wildebeest: the Fediverse on Cloudflare
Day 36 of #100daysofhomelab and after yesterday’s post about RAID 10 on my external array, I found ZFS on OSX, and well, now I have a ZFS RAIDZ pool setup. It is showing as around 28.8Tb usable space, and so far, so good.
Other than that, I have been looking into Ubuntu Landscape to monitor my Ubuntu fleet of machines. If you host it in-house, you get 10 machines for free, so hopefully, that’s enough for me to start with… I am working on getting it running on 22.04, using these beta install steps. RB5009 install is still pending… keep hitting stupid blocks stopping me from doing it, but hopefully this week…
Day 35 of #100daysofhomelab and I have been trying to clean up some stuff for my Mac Book Pro. I have an external enclosure from Yottamaster that has 5 3.5” bays and connects via USB C (USB 3.1). I got 5 8TB Seagate IronWolf drives in there. Currently, I have it set up as RAID 10 with 16Tb usable, which is named Archive, with 1 extra drive non-protected 8Tb drive. The details on setting up RAID 10 on MacOS is in the links section. I was looking at using RAID 5 for the archive pool, but the only option that seems to be available is SoftRAID but it’s USD250 for a license unless you have an OWC enclosure… Given the enclosure cost me that much in the first place, I think I will keep with RAID 10 for the while… RAID 5 would, potentially, give me 32Tb usable on my Archive, but 250 is a bit steep… for now…
I also have a Sabrent USB 3.0 4 Bay 2.5” enclosure with 4 500Gb Samsung SSDs, named SCRATCH. This is in RAID 0 (I know, I know, if one drive goes MIA, all data is lost… That’s why this is a TEMP folder! It’s backed up to the Archive and also to BackBlaze). This is mostly stuff that is downloaded, and Video work that, when completed, is moved to the Archive Folder. Anyway, files are currently moving, so I will leave that as is.
On an update for the RB5009, It was originally planned for today, but the daddy found a TV show on Netflix, so it will have to be done either this evening or tomorrow morning… We will see… Anyway, some links:
- Create a RAID 10 on Mac OS (Monterey)
- VMware warns admins to patch ESXi servers, disable OpenSLP service (bleepingcomputer.com)
- Beelink GTR6 Review An Improved AMD Ryzen Mini PC (servethehome.com)
- Intel NUC 12 Pro Wall Street Canyon Review Fanned and Fanless (servethehome.com)
- Ansible Galaxy – Jeff Geerling has a LOAD of useful stuff up here. I use his node_exporter role to install Prometheus Node Exporter on boxes without having to touch them. Very cool.
- How much can you really get out of a 4$ VPS? (alicegg.tech)
- The technology behind GitHub’s new code search | The GitHub Blog
- Bloatware pushes the Galaxy S23 Android OS to an incredible 60GB | Ars Technica
Day 34 of #100daysofhomelab and I have realized I missed yesterday and also duplicated day 16… (facepalm). So, it’s day 34, I think…
Still working on the RB5009 upgrade. I am “technically” on holiday for the long weekend here in Ireland, so I have been out of the homelab more than I have been in. I need to move stuff around before I can swap in the RB5009, including changes to my VoIP setup (or at least wait till e everyone is asleep and won’t notice it being down) and some rewiring tasks… See below. I did also have to order new cables to try and keep some consistency in length… How well that will work is unknown… Hopefully, I will be back in the homelab a bit more on Tuesday… We see what I can break then.
Day 31 of #100daysofhomelab and I am going through the config from my CHR to bring over to my RB5009, and, well, I have no idea what I was doing when I built the original config… Now to try and figure out what the config did, since I want to document it here so I know what I was thinking, but to also possibly help someone else… Mind you, at this stage, it won’t be much help… I also need to figure out how to add my Zerotier Bridge into the mix.
So, as trying to get a high level overview of how this works, lets start with this:
- The cable modem comes in at 1Gb/s down, 50Mb/s up. It hands off at 1Gb ethernet and plugs into a switch on VLAN 900. Anything on VLAN 900 can get a public IP from that modem (statically assigned, I have 5 usages, the first being the modem to act as a gateway).
- FTTH comes in and goes to my small quad 2.5Gb box, which then, using CHR (we call this DUB1-BK01), hands off a /29 to VLAN 905. Again, any devices on VLAN 905 can get a public IP from there, and use BK01 as a gateway.
- For the current CHR (DUB1-BGP01) it being a VM has currently got 3 connections: eth1 is connected to VLAN900, eth2 is connected to VLAN905 and eth3 is connected to VLAN901. VLAN901 has a /27 from my block of /24 addresses, and anything on that VLAN can use an IP from that pool and the IP from DUB1-BGP01 as its gateway.
- DUB1-BGP01 does some BGP routing to my upstream servers. lon1, which is based in Vultr London, and fra3, which is based in M&M Networks in Frankfurt Germany. lon1 has transit from Vultr and fra3 gets transit from M&M Networks, but also connects to multiple Internet Exchanges: DE-CIX Frankfurt, DE-CIX Dusseldorf, DE-CIX Hamburg, DE-CIX Munich, KleyReX, LocIX and LocIX Dusseldorf. More details of the network and peers, etc, are available on as204994.net.
- DUB1-BGP01 connects to both lon1 and fra3 over WireGuard connections. All traffic to lon1 is sent over the Cable Modem link. All traffic to fra3 is sent over the FTTH link. Currently, there is no automatic failover if one link dies… This is where (hopefully) Zerotier comes into play.
- I have a VM running on my i7 2.5Gb box that has connections to both VLAN900 and VLAN905, along with VLAN911. I have a bridge on that box that connects VLAN911 to a Zerotier network which is used only for internal peering. It has a /28 Public IP Range and anything on that bridge can use an IP from that network and talk to other machines. Currently that bridge is directly connected to my UDM Pro, and it gets a public IP and uses fra3 as a gateway. Sometimes traffic goes though fra3 but comes back over lon1 (due to asymmetric routing). But because of the way the network is working, all traffic can flow without issues.
- The plan is to use that VLAN along with the 2 WireGuard links and give me 2 connections to lon1 and fra3. In theory, if one connection goes down, the traffic should be able to flow the other way…
So, at least that is the theory… How well this will work is anyone’s guess… But more messing with configs is required.
Day 30 of #100daysofhomelab and I tried to look into getting my RB5009 setup, and well… it has the wrong power supply! EU, not UK/Ireland… More messing is required! [Update] Found the right supply, but fell asleep watching TV… more messing tomorrow…
- Cloudflare’s handling of a bug in interpreting IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses
- Martin Woodward: “GitHub have added better Masto…” – s.o2l.ie
- Speedify 13 Is Apple Silicon Ready – Speedify
Day 29 of #100daysofhomelab and my RB5009 finally arrived! The bad news is I am up to my eyes with some out-of-hours updates for my $DayJob… So, it will probably be tomorrow or Friday before I get to it… It’s been that kind of a day. I am OOF from Friday to next Wednesday, so I should have plenty of time to play with. I also started playing around with Tailscale Funnel. I got my hands on an invite, and it looks like I can invite other people to it… If you are interested, leave a comment. I have not actually done much with it, mostly reading the docs and testing it before i make it public… But should be interesting. Anyway, now for some links.
- This is NOT the Pi killer you’re looking for – YouTube
- Apple: Your $52,000 Mac Pro Is Now Worth $1,000 – YMCinema – News & Insights on Digital Cinema
- Devbox Cloud
- Netlify Acquires Gatsby Inc. to Accelerate Adoption of Composable Web Architectures
Day 28 of #100daysofhomelab and I got some benchmarks for the WordPress site. First, using ab, going directly to WordPress. It does have W3 Total Cache turned on, using Redis for DB and Object Cache, etc. 10000 requests at 100 a go, 682 requests a second and meantime of 146ms per request. Total bandwidth is around 50Mbit/s.
CPU usage while running this is somewhat pegged around the 100% mark.
Next, we run the same but this time direct to Varnish. It is caching the requests and not hitting the Nginx box. We are now at 1899 requests per second (2.7X more) and our meantime is down to 52ms (nearly 3x faster). and the bandwidth is now nearly 140Mb/s, again, nearly 3x higher.
and CPU usage is a little bit lower too!
So, happy days! Tomorrow I will be working on my RB5009 install, so photos, shouting and more will be uploaded then… but for now, some links.
- LoRaBridge Literature – Extend ZigBee devices using LoRa. Interesting idea.
- Security Writer :verified: :donor:: “We have one client which we ma…” – Infosec Exchange “In roughly two hours, 1647 devices are about to be locked out of access to organisation resources, wiped, and removed from Intune permanently.”
- Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022
Day 27 of #100daysofhomelab and it does look like WordPress is running correctly and quite fast… Yesterday’s messing with configs got Varnish, Memcached and Redis all running along with upgrading from PHP8.0 to 8.2. The problem now seems to be related to caching rules… So, some messing with that is required… My RB5009 is now stuck in France and has been there since Friday… It is scheduled for delivery on Wednesday, so that will be a fun day breaking stuff… Its been on quite the trip. Most of that was in 3 days, but it got stuck in France and hasnt moved over the weekend… Fingers crossed it arrives on Wednesday!
So, some links… yea, some are not exactly home lab, but its homelab adjacent?
- HerrZatacke/wifi-gbp-emulator: A GameBoy printer emulator which provides the received data over a wifi-connection. (github.com) – Hardware hacking like this still impresses me! I would love to know how to actually do this!
- A 16x NVIDIA GPU 128 Core Arm Server Supermicro ARS-210M-NR with Ampere Altra (servethehome.com)
- The Calculator Drawer : Free Software : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive
- A Calculated Move: Calculators Now Emulated at Internet Archive – Internet Archive Blogs
- Software Library: Palm and Palmpilot Applications : Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive
- Microsoft blames router IP address change for global outage • The Register
- USB Accelerator | Coral
Day 26 of #100daysofhomelab and I have been trying to figure out why my internet has been unstable today… it up and down a few times… well, parts of it are… Zerotier seems to be sorting out my main network, it’s smaller parts that are going wonky… I am half thinking of leaving it till next weekend since my RB5009 arrives next week… This should help me sort out my network…
Also, spending time upgrading my WordPress site too… just making sure all is working correctly… Fun times…
[Update]: I have managed to upgrade to PHP 8.2, the latest Nginx and now have Varnish in front of the site… Let’s see what breaks…
Day 25 of #100daysofhomelab, and not done much in the way of home lab work today, but has tested the bejesus out of the internet connection! I bought a Backblaze License for my Mac Book Pro, which initially has around 2.3Tb to backup. There are my YouTube Videos along with code and other bits… It looks like it has uploaded 290 Gb in the last 24 hours…
I also bought an Xbox Series X, and have downloaded a few games to it too… I previously had an Xbox One S with the Games Pass Ultimate, so those games were downloaded. I think it’s downloaded nearly 200 GB in the last few hours! Finally, my mother got home from the hospital yesterday and found a Netflix TV show she wanted to watch and has binge-watched most of it. That seems to be a bit more sedate 20Gb since last night… Overall, the Zerotier-backed connection seems to be working well!
Other than that, watched the Techno Tim video on MaaS. Looks interesting. And I am also looking into the idea of using Mastodon/Fediverse replies in WordPress… I found this post about doing it on static sites. More digging required i think, but now I’m off to play Flight Simulator!
Day 24 of #100daysofhomelab and most of it was spent migrating my ADS-B stuff from a VM to a Raspberry Pi (see Day 23 for links). So far, I am “feeding” FlightRadar24, ADSB Exchange, FlightAware and RadarBox. I also love some of the graphs I am getting out of it below. Currently, the antenna I am using is a little small and hanging out of a window, so I am missing some flights. The next plan is to get a better one and move the Pi to the CloudShed where I can mount the antenna better.
Day 23 of #100daysofhomelab and i am trying to do some migration today. I built my ADB-S monitor for both FlightRadar24 and ADBSExchange on my ESXi host, and now i want to move it to my Raspberry Pi… So, trying to get my Pi 4 working (not sure if the SD is wonkey, or something else is wrong) but thats my challange… I am using the following guide which allows you to run this as a docker instance on the Pi, which means, in theory, adding extra servers (which, in the case of the premium ones, like FlightRadar24) give you free service while you supply data.
And as usual, some links i found…
- Overview — Flent: The FLExible Network Tester
- Rails on Docker · Fly
- Docker without Docker · Fly
- Year of the Voice – Chapter 1: Assist – Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)
- OPNsense 23.1 released
- Yubico | #YubiKey on Twitter: “”Apple now lets you protect your Apple ID and iCloud account with hardware security keys, a significant upgrade for those who want maximum protection from hackers, identity thieves, or snoops.” – @stshank via @CNET https://t.co/wvGBnkuzru” / Twitter
That’s about it for the day. Till next time…
Day 22 of #100daysofhomelab and I have been planning out my network update for when my RB5009 arrives… Not ready to share, yet, but it should be here on the 2nd Feb, so I will have a plan (maybe) by the weekend… Other than that, it’s a link dump for today:
- Tailscale actions for iOS and macOS Shortcuts · Tailscale
- Tailscale Funnel · Tailscale
- 512GB version of the new MacBook Pro has a slower SSD than the Mac it replaces | Ars Technica
- Using PiBenchmarks.com for SBC disk performance testing | Jeff Geerling
- Welcome to nornir’s documentation! — nornir 3.1.1 documentation
- devon-mar/nornir_routeros (github.com)
Ok, I kind of got the following diagram, but it only makes sense in my head, and I’m not even sure it makes sense there… I’ll leave this here without further explanation, till maybe the weekend…
Day 21 (slightly late, forgot to post this last night) of #100daysofhomelab and its a links day.
- Using Aztfy to import existing Azure resources into Terraform – Thomas Thornton
- Azure/aztfy: A tool to bring existing Azure resources under Terraform’s management (github.com)
- Traefik Proxy now offers Tailscale as certificate resolver · Tailscale
- Exploring the Tailscale-Traefik Integration | Traefik Labs
on a more different note, my Mikrotik RB5009UG+S+IN is finally on its way! Hopefully will have it next week! Happy days!
Day 20 of #100daysofhomelab and not much going on today. I posted a new video unboxing the ChargeASAP Omega 100W and 200W chargers (embedded below). I also tweaked my daily carry bag, pictured below. More details on that later, it’s been a pain in the ass of a day, but hope to get some updates tomorrow.
Day 19 of #100daysofhomelab and not done a lot today, so its mostly links…
- New Lenovo ThinkSystem V3 Servers with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Launched (servethehome.com)
- New Dell PowerEdge Servers with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids Launched (servethehome.com)
- MikroTik CRS504-4XQ-IN Review Momentus 4x 100GbE and 25GbE Desktop Switch (servethehome.com)
- git-sim: Visually simulate Git operations in your own repos (initialcommit.com)
- The 88×31 GIF Collection | Part 1 (dabamos.de) looking though these makes me feel old…
- Swipe right on our new credit card tokens! – Thinkst Thoughts
- Canarytokens
Day 18 of #100daysofhomelab and today I moved my Unifi Protect cameras from my UDM Pro to my Cloud Key Gen 2. Why? The UDM Pro is still stuck on Unifi OS 2.4 (hopefully it will get 3 at some stage…). The Cloud Key Gen 2, however, does run 3.0. Some of the new Protect features are limited to Unifi OS 3.0, and I wanted to try them out. Also, my UCK has a 5Tb HDD in it, but my UDM only has 3, so I get more recording space from the UCK. So far, seems to be running well. Everything else is still on the UDM Pro. Only Protect has moved. More tomorrow.
day 17 of #100daysofhomelab, and I haven’t done much, so its a link roundup today:
- Looking back at 2022: A year of growth, funding and lots of new features · Tailscale
- Integrations · Tailscale
- Tailscale on Proxmox host · Tailscale
- Tailscale on Kubernetes · Tailscale
- OPNsense 22.7.11 released
- OPNsense 23.1-RC2 released
- v7.8beta [testing] is released! – MikroTik
- ROSE-storage – RouterOS – MikroTik Documentation
day 16 of #100daysofhomelab, and my test from yesterday paid off!
droped from 10 to less than 4gb of RAM used on one of my proxmox boxes by moving the storage from local ZFS to NFS… Mind you, only seems to have made a difference on this box…
On a more different note, this blog is now on the fediverse. You can subscribe by searching for @tiernano@www.tiernanotoole.ie on your fediverse client. It is done with the help of pfefferle/wordpress-activitypub: ActivityPub for WordPress (github.com).
Day 16 of #100daysofhomelab and not much going on. Busy with work. I am running a test though. I seen the following tweet a few days back:
Moved my Proxmox cluster storage over to an NFS share on my @Synology NAS. Letting the NAS handle the filesystem, reduced the RAM usage on each of my nodes considerably!
RAM usage now at 20% from 80%+! 60% reduction!!
Thanks to @TomLawrenceTech for giving me the idea! pic.twitter.com/VGtNpRoEu1
— David Burgess (@davidnburgess) January 17, 2023
Given some of my smaller boxes are running 90%+ memory usage, i have decided to move the VMs from my NUC to my QNAP storage box. Its going to take a while to move them over, but we see what RAM usage is like after.
Just for reference, this is the before:
Day 15 of #100daysofhomelab and i have been playing with Portainer a bit, including the Pi-Hosted templates. So far, i have installed Rust Desk and Your Spotify.
Day 14 of #100daysofhomelab and I have been thinking about future upgrades if I had the money… So, I have my CloudShed in the back garden. Currently, I only have an HP Micro Server and a (not currently in production) Dell R720, along with a Ubiquiti Edge Switch 48 Lite. Between the Shed and the house is a fibre link purchased through FS.com, with 6 pairs. Currently, only 1 pair is in use, giving me a 10Gb/s between the house and shed, and with the easy option to upgrade to 20Gb. But I have been thinking bigger.
I have been looking at the Mikrotik CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe (a bit of a mouthful…) SmartNIC. It’s a full MikroTik router on a PCIe Card. It has a Quad-core ARM Processor, 4GB RAM, some storage and 2X25Gbit/s Interfaces… Well, technically, 4… there are 2 front connectors and 4 that the host server sees… If I am reading the diagram below correctly, it looks like all ports are seen by the Host, but 2 go through the bridge and 2 go direct… I haven’t played with one yet (Mikrotik, if you are listening, hint, hint!) so not sure how it would work… A review from Alyx Wijers says that on the Linux box they tried, the 10Gb SFP+ module they had shows in passthrough and the other 2 are connected to the bridge… Ideally, for the ideas i have for this, I passthrough would be handy for stuff like storage, but i would want the rest of my traffic going over that bridge interface… Or at least i think thats how it would work…
The card has 2X25Gb ports (SFP28 ports) that connect to the rest of your network, for example to a CRS504-4XQ-IN switch (4x100Gb ports, which can be broken out into 4x25Gb ports each…). If you go through the bridge, you get all the features of RouterOS, like firewall rules, VXLAN, etc, all in the NIC. The switch then doesn’t need to do as much, letting it do the switching and leaving everything else at a NIC level. If you use passthrough, you, essentially, bypass the router/firewall rules… I think…
So, what would my plan for the upgrade be? Well, this is where things get expensive… I would need 2 of the switches (one in the house, one in the shed linked with a single 100Gb fibre). Then, I would need 8 of the SmartNICs (GodboxV3, GodBoxV2, 1 for each of the R720s (second one coming soon), 1 for each of the R620s (coming soon), one for the HP DL380 G8 (also pending) and 1 for the big storage box… again, pending). The plan would be that GodBoxV2 and V3 would be in the house, and both connect to the house switch at 25Gb a sec. there would be uplinks to internal 10Gb switches along with the UDM Pro.
In the shed, the 6 servers would each connect to the switch at 25Gb, using 10 of the renaming 12 ports. The R720s, Storage Box and HP will probably get 2x25Gb connections. In theory, the R620s could also connect at 50Gb but I would have no extra room later… Might not be a major issue, mind you. There would be spare ports in the house… I could, in theory, get a second 100Gb switch for the shed!
But, what would this cost? Well, current prices are showing that the cards are around 200EUR a pop and the switch is just shy of 800 quid… so, for a little under €3200, I could get 2 switches and 8 NICs. I would need break-out cables, 100Gb Optics, and some other bits, so, say 500 quid for that… So, just under 4k? One of these days, hey! I can dream!
MikroTik CRS504-4XQ-IN Review Momentus 4x 100GbE and 25GbE Desktop Switch (servethehome.com)
Review: A Dive into Mikrotik’s Weird SmartNIC (CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe) // Alyx Wijers
Day 13 of #100daysofhomelab and it’s mostly a rest and update day. I got my Plex Server back online, so ended up watching a load of stuff on that. Also, I upgraded my OpnSense box to OPNsense 23.1.beta. There are not many machines behind it, but I will keep my eye on it and see how things go. Hope to be back to some normality tomorrow.
Day 12 of #100daysofhomelab and I am still battling with my ZFS pool on my Plex Server… So, that has taken all my time today… ugh…
update to day 11 of #100daysofhomelab, and I thought this needed its own dedicated post. I managed to fix my ZFS pool and got it imported into Ubuntu, so all is good, but I found these links and this is cool!
- sickcodes/Docker-OSX: Run macOS VM in a Docker! Run near native OSX-KVM in Docker! X11 Forwarding! CI/CD for OS X Security Research! Docker mac Containers. (github.com)
- sickcodes/dock-droid: Docker Android – Run QEMU Android in a Docker! X11 Forwarding! CI/CD for Android! (github.com)
- Intro and Background – BlueBubbles Server
So…. running MacOS and Android inside Docker is pretty cool! Could be handy for building, well, build servers for developers that need MacOS. and the Android stuff is handy for dev/testing too. Very cool.
Well, day 9 of #100daysofhomelab is about Disaster Recovery… Well, at least the disaster part… Recovery not so much… My Kubernetes cluster, how do I put this… shat the bed… It’s been up and down all day and then the Longhorn storage failed and took my WordPress install with it… I lost yesterday’s post (which isn’t the end of the world) but it’s a pain in the ass… I ended up using the old docker copy of WordPress, so at least that’s online.
So, going to shut down the full cluster and start again… Might be looking at something other than Longhorn for storage… but giving up for the day… I will be back tomorrow.
Day 7 of #100daysofhomelab and just a quick update for today: this site is now running on my Kubernetes Cluster! I am using Cloudflare tunnels for the ingress controller (more on that later) and so far, so good… Most of this was done yesterday, and it was a swap over of the DNS stuff today… been sick most of the day, so that’s all I got in me for day 7…
I now think this WordPress instance is hosted on Kubernetes and is also being shared over CloudflareD running inside Kubernetes! If this shows on my main site, it works! If not, I have broken something…
[UPDATE] Yup! It’s working!
Day 5 of #100daysofhomelab and its mostly reading… the daddy was in the hospital for the last 2 weeks, including over Christmas day, so tomorrow is Christmas day for us… Turkey, ham and all the usual stuff… So, been busy with that. But have been reading a couple of docs, so some links for today:
- From zero to Zerotier in k3s way. The aim of this guide, is to provide… | by Juan Pablo Caivano | IoTOps | Medium
- Part 1: K3s, ZeroTier, DigitalOcean, and more…Oh my! · Dan Manners Dot Com
- Lens | The Kubernetes IDE (k8slens.dev)
- Introduction – External Secrets Operator (external-secrets.io)
- onedr0p/home-ops: A mono repository for my home infrastructure and Kubernetes cluster which adheres to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps practices where possible (github.com)
- Helm | Helm Uninstall
- Helm | Helm List
That’s about it for today… I’ll be back tomorrow… hopefully…
Day 4 of #100daysofhomelab and I am still reading the docs I posted yesterday on Kubernetes. I hope to get something sorted this weekend… On a different note, I posted a new YouTube video on the iODD ST400, linked below. This is a follow-up to my iODD Mini review I did a couple of years back. Hopefully, I will have a second video with some speed tests and a better walk in the next few days… hopefully.
Update: I think I am going to have to get my i7 with 6 2.5Gb Ethernet ports and one of the R720s up and running soon… I am running out of memory on my Proxmox cluster.
Day 3 of #100daysofhomelab and more Kubernetes messing today. Haven’t got it working, but messing with it is a start. Some links and notes are below:
- How to deploy WordPress on Kubernetes — Part 1 | by Bharathiraja | CodeX | Medium
- How to Deploy WordPress On Kubernetes — Part 2 | by Bharathiraja | CodeX | Medium
- inlets/inlets-pro: Secure HTTP and TCP tunnels that just work (github.com)
- (K3S – 5/8) Self-host your Media Center On Kubernetes with Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Transmission and Jackett (jeanmart.me)
- (K3S – 6/8) Self-host Pi-Hole on Kubernetes and block ads and trackers at the network level (jeanmart.me)
- (K3S – 8/8) Deploy Prometheus and Grafana to monitor a Kubernetes cluster (jeanmart.me)
- kubectl Cheat Sheet | Kubernetes
- Use cloudflared to expose a Kubernetes app to the Internet · Cloudflare Zero Trust docs
- Using Cloudflare Tunnels to Securely Expose Kubernetes Services | by Nima Mahmoudi | ITNEXT
- Deploy Cloudflare Tunnel on Kubernetes – Frank’s Weblog (nyan.im)
I am planning on moving my WordPress install over from my Docker host to Kubernetes in the next few days, so running through the docks from Bharathiraja above, but I keep getting errors related to MySQL… More digging is required. I use Cloudflare Tunnels to secure my WordPress install, so the docs on how to use Cloudflare Tunnels with Kubernetes are important…
Day 2 of #100daysofhomelab and more messing with Kubernetes… So far, I have built, torn down, rebuilt and torn down a second time… and now building for a third time! Techno Tims Ansible scripts for the Win! A couple of notes for today:
- the script uses K3s version 1.24.8-k3s1. at some stage yesterday I tried changing this to 1.26.0-k3s1, the latest version from the K3s GitHub page… This was a bad idea. Rancher does not like this, and, well, I don’t know what I am doing, so I want to see what Rancher does…
- ideally, you would have multiple master nodes, but, me being the lazy git that I am, only set up 1… but it does look like it could be changeable later on…
- I have a total of 6 VMs running my K3S cluster: 3 are 4 Cores with 8GB RAM running on GodBoxV2, which is now running Proxmox. The other 3 are each running on my HP Micro Server, the Quad 2.5Gb Celeron Box and an 8th Gen Intel NUC… each is given 2 cores and 4GB RAM. That gives me a total of (roughly) 18 cores and 36GB RAM. Each VM has around 50 GB of storage and using Longhorn, I have around 250GB of space (master does not seem to contribute space). Replicas are set to 3, so not quite a full 250GB.
- Why Kubernetes? Well, I have 2 VMs currently running my fleet of docker containers. I have lost count of how many i actually have. So, my plan is to use Kubernetes to move all them from those single docker boxes, and have them more distributed and more HA. This will allow me to move stuff around easier, or at least i think it will… At the very least, i get to play with new tech!
More work on the cluster is required. This blog is hosted in-house on one of the docker instances… Hopefully, at some stage, it will be moved to the K3s cluster! That would be the first major move!
I have decided to start my #100daysofhomelab journey again, so today is day 1. I have been working on a K3s cluster in the house, and so far, I have to start again… going to rebuild it again tomorrow at some stage…
Lots of Links* techno-tim/k3s-ansible: The easiest way to bootstrap a self-hosted High Availability Kubernetes cluster. A fully automated HA k3s etcd install with kube-vip, MetalLB, and more (github.com) * Cloud Native Distributed Storage in Kubernetes with Longhorn | Techno Tim Documentation * High Availability Rancher on kubernetes | Techno Tim Documentation * Create Longhorn Volumes * The Ultimate Kubernetes Homelab Guide: From Zero to Production Cluster On-Premises (datastrophic.io) * Configuring Traefik 2 Ingress for Kubernetes | Techno Tim Documentation * HIGH AVAILABILITY k3s (Kubernetes) in minutes! | Techno Tim Documentation * kubernetes | Techno Tim Documentation * Beautiful Dashboards with Grafana and Prometheus – Monitoring Kubernetes Tutorial | Techno Tim Documentation
some notes for myself:
Service Account for Dashboardto create the Service account, create a file, ca.yml, and enter the following:
apiVersion: v1kind: ServiceAccountmetadata: name: <username> namespace: kube-system
next, create a file called cluster-role-binding.yml with the following:
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1kind: ClusterRoleBindingmetadata: name: <username>roleRef: apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io kind: ClusterRole name: cluster-adminsubjects:- kind: ServiceAccount name: <username> namespace: kube-system
make sure username matches!
run the following commands:
kubectl apply -f sa.yml
kubectl apply -f cluster-role-binding.yml
kubectl -n kube-system create token <username>
Installing OpenSCSI and NFS (required for Longhorn) with AnsibleAnsible Script
---- hosts: k3s become: true tasks: - name: Update and upgrade apt packages become: true apt: upgrade: yes update_cache: yes cache_valid_time: 600 - name: install packages become: true apt: pkg: - nfs-common - open-iscsi - name: Make sure open-iscsi ansible.builtin.systemd: enabled: true state: started name: open-iscsi
I have a load of these Smart Plugs from GoSund around the house (currently around 11, but more are still in boxes). The handy part of these is they can be re-programmed using Tuya Convert and using the following config you can get power usage and an on/off switch. I have mine hooked up to […]
I am participating in the #100daysofhomelab challenge and have been posting a lot on Twitter as @tiernano, but some posts and tasks I am doing will require longer-form write-ups. So, some updates will include either Videos (which will be published on my Youtube Channel) or blog posts, which will go here. This is the first […]
A few weeks back, Ubiquiti released a pre-release update for the Unifi Network Controller, version 7.1.61. It got installed on my UDM and I noticed a few interesting bits that you might find handy… First, you will need to be signed up for Unifi Early Access before you can download or even read the release […]
For the last few weeks, I have been running a Raspberry Pi in my car, along with a small UPS and a Wifi Access point, allowing me to download videos from my dash cam and back them up to my NAS in the house. But I have had some teething issues, and I am currently […]
A few months back (well, November 2020) I wrote about connecting to my car with Zerotier. In this post, I mentioned using a TP-Link router running OpenWRT and a Huawei LTE dongle to connect to the internet, which allowed me to then connect to my Blackvue Dashcam and watch remotely… But it had some issues […]
So, this has been a blog post in the making for a while now but never got around to fully writing it up, so here goes nothing… I run a UDM Pro in the house. It has 2 WAN Links: 1 1Gb link and 1 10Gb Link. I also run AS204994, my own ASN with […]
I use ZeroTier on my network for a good few things, including internal network peering between BGP VMs, management of machines, and now, connecting to my car over LTE. This is one of those posts that sounds silly, but is very handy! First, the parts list: Car… 3G/4G/5G modem of some sort. I am using […]
I have posted about backups a few times on this site in recent years, and its still something I make tweaks to every now and again. The latest setup is probably over the top, but I will give you a walk though on it and some of it could be useful to some of you. […]
With the whole Work From Home thing probably becoming more and more normal in the years to come (I can count on 2 hands how many times I have physically been in my main office in the last 7 months) there are a couple of certainties in that people will come up against. One is […]
[NOTE] This post was done entirely on iPhone XS Max and a iPad Pro. Photos taken on the iPhone. Some edited on iPhone, some on the iPad. I have edited some text on the iPad with the keyboard, but if i missed anything, all was written mostly live, so apologies… Will add extra links to […]
A few days back (October 6th 2020) VMWare announced a new “Fling”: ESXi Arm Edition. Not completely sure what a Fling is, but anyway, I started reading, liked the idea and managed to download a copy for testing. I have 2 Pi 4s in the house, both 4Gb Models, and I wanted to play around […]
A few months back, I pre ordered a Nexdock Touch. The Nexdock Touch is a laptop without the laptop components… its essentially a screen (1920×1080 touch) with a keyboard, battery, touch pad, a 3 USB C ports (one for charging, one for phones only and one for connecting other devices) a Full USB A port […]
I have moved my blog back over to WordPress. It is running in house, on one of my workstations, using Cloudflare’s Argo tunnel to protect it on the internet. You might be asking “why?!” Well, its a couple of things.
- Easier to blog and post from anywhere in the world.
- I can blog on pretty much anything
- No having to worry about upgrading my copy of Hugo breaking my site…
That last one is the reason I haven’t blogged in a while. Seems there was a major change in the versioning of Hugo, somewhere between the release I was on (0.55.6) and the latest one I tried (0.73.0 or something… 0.76.3 is out now) and my index.html pages just would not create, and I got many warnings when building… I spent a few hours trying to figure it out, but in the end, I gave up.
I ended up using Chris Salzman’s blob post explaining how he moved from Hugo to WordPress, spent a hour or so tweaking the imported files, built a Docker-Compose file (I will post this somewhere soon, if anyone wants it) and was off to the races. Few tweaks later, a copy of CloudflareD and some DNS tweaks, and everything was back online.
There are some disadvantages to WordPress:
- Comment Spam
- Performance
- Maintenance
- Security
But even so, I am willing to worry about these and be able to blog easier.
In a previous post i talked about going all in on VoIP in the house. Its been nearly a year now, and other than some minor issues related to the VoIP Server being turned off accidentally, or a screw up on my end, all is going well. But, one thing i did notice was related to incoming calls and caller Id, specifically on my SIP2SIM card. Essentially, the country code was wrong: for example: Incoming calls from the Virgin Media trunk just show as local numbers (for Dublin, for example, it would so 01xxxxxxx). Using the CID reformatting feature in 3CX, I managed to change this.
All calls that come in starting with 0 are “fixed” and changed to +353 without the 0. When the call comes in though the SIP2SIM card, it does no longer show as a call from the UK, but now shows as a call in Ireland, or where it is coming from, so all the contact details show correctly! Happy days!
So, this post has been a long time coming! A load of different things to talk about, so lets get started!
GodBox V3 So, for a long time, I have been thinking about GodBoxV3, the replacement to GodBoxV2. And when planning this, i had some ideas of what it should be:
- Minimum of 2×16 cores (double godboxv2)
- About the same RAM, if not more
- FAST STORAGE!
- Is able to run my twin 30" 4K monitors
- Would like 10Gb/s NICs
Well, It finally happened! I got the machine, built it and, well, its impressive! How did i do with specs? Well…
- 2X Intel Xeon Gold 6138 Processors (20 cores) cooled by 2 Noctua NH-U12 DX3647 coolers
- Supermicro X11DPH-T motherboard with 2x10Gb links onboard
- 128GB Crucial ECC DDR4 RAM (4 32GB Sticks)
- 2x 512GB Samsung 970 Pro NVMe drives
- 2x8TB HDDs for extra storage (shucked from 5 WD My Book 8TBs)
- NVidia GTX1060 graphics
- All in the very nice (and MASSIVE!) Cooler Master Cosmos II 25th Anniversary edition case.
All is good! Photos, more details and benchmarks coming soon… stay tuned!
Finally 10Gb/s Networking! Since GodBoxV3 had a few 10Gb nics, i needed to upgrade the network to support it. I ended up with a Ubiquiti Networks EdgeSwitch-XG. 16 ports (12 SFP+ and 4 RJ45). The SubperMicro board has 2xRJ45 ports. Due to lack of RJ45 ports, GodBoxV3 is connected to 1, GodBoxV2 is getting a 10Gb card soon, which will be connected to 1 port, and a new Sun Microsystems server (details below) will be getting the last 2… Of the SFP+ ports, 2 are connected to the EdgeSwitch Lite, 2 to the Synology (it got a 10Gig NIC reciently too!) and 2 to the new NAS (again, more details below!)
Good bye Mikrotik, Hello EdgeRouter 4 Since i was going all Ubiquiti gear (Wifi is Unifi gear) i got rid of the old Microtik and replaced it with a Ubiquiti ER4. Happy days! Got some plans for this, more details coming soon…
Updates to BGP Stuff, including IPv6 I lost one VPS in London, but replaced it with a new one from HostUS. I still use Vultr, Packet and VServer.Site as providers too. I am also adding more and more IPv6 stuff too… There is a post on AS204994 explaining a lot of this.
New NAS and more storage! New NAS got purchased: QNAP TS-932X. I have 5X8TB spinny disks (shucked from 5 WD My Book 8TBs) + 4 X 500GB WD Blue SSDs.
New Servers and cooling updates Moved lots of stuff around the room… Servers run cooler, and less noisy! happy days! I also got my hands on a very nice looking Sun Server X3-2. Its a Dual Xeon E5 (currently got quad cores, going to upgrade it to 8 cores) and i think its got 16GB ram and 4x300GB SAS Disks. It also has 4X10Gb nics! ESXi will probably go on here!
VMWare in the house Up till recently, I ran Hyper-V all round. Its still on GodBox V2 and V3 (v1 has a HDD issue, so its off…), but the main VM hosts (the C6100’s) are being migrated to VMWare ESXi… Why? Its a learning exercise… We see how it goes…
So, long update… Any questions, comments, etc… shout!