linux  


Quick Salt State to Deploy Netdata

As a follow-up to my recent explorations with using Tailscale Serve to make netdata monitoring readily available on my tailnet, I wanted a quick way to reproduce that configuration across my handful of systems. These systems already have Tailscale installed and configured, and they're all managed with Salt. So here's a hasty Salt state that I used to make it happen. It simply installs netdata using the handy-dandy kickstart script, and then configures Tailscale to Serve the netdata instance (with a trusted cert!

I Ditched vSphere for Proxmox VE

Way back in 2021, I documented how I had built a VMWare-focused home lab on an Intel NUC 9 host. The setup was fairly complicated specifically so I could build and test content for what was then known as vRealize Automation. My priorities have since shifted1, though, and I no longer have need for vRA at my house. vSphere + vCenter carries a hefty amount of overhead, so I thought it might be time to switch my homelab over to something a bit simpler in the form of Proxmox VE.

Using systemctl edit to Delay Service Startup

Following a recent update, I found that the Linux development environment on my Framework Chromebook would fail to load if the Tailscale daemon was already running. It seems that the Tailscale virtual interface may have interfered with how the CrOS Terminal app was expecting to connect to the Linux container. I initially worked around the problem by just disabling the tailscaled service, but having to remember to start it up manually was a pretty heavy cognitive load.

Easy Push Notifications With ntfy.sh

The Pitch Wouldn't it be great if there was a simple way to send a notification to your phone(s) with just a curl call? Then you could get notified when a script completes, a server reboots, a user logs in to a system, or a sensor connected to Home Assistant changes state. How great would that be?? ntfy.sh (pronounced notify) provides just that. It's an open-source, easy-to-use, HTTP-based notification service, and it can notify using mobile apps for Android (Play or F-Droid) or iOS (App Store) or a web app.

Cat a File Without Comments

It's super handy when a Linux config file is loaded with comments to tell you precisely how to configure the thing, but all those comments can really get in the way when you're trying to review the current configuration. Next time, instead of scrolling through page after page of lengthy embedded explanations, just use: egrep -v "^\s*(#|$)" $filename # [tl! .cmd] For added usefulness, I alias this command to ccat (which my brain interprets as "commentless cat") in my ~/.

Create Virtual Machines on a Chromebook with HashiCorp Vagrant

I've lately been trying to do more with Salt at work, but I'm still very much a novice with that tool. I thought it would be great to have a nice little portable lab environment where I could deploy a few lightweight VMs and practice managing them with Salt - without impacting any systems that are actually being used for anything. Along the way, I figured I'd leverage HashiCorp Vagrant to create and manage the VMs, which would provide a declarative way to define what the VMs should look like.

Tailscale on VMware Photon OS

You might remember that I'm a pretty big fan of Tailscale, which makes it easy to connect your various devices together in a secure tailnet, or private network. Tailscale is super simple to set up on most platforms, but you'll need to install it manually if there isn't a prebuilt package for your system. Here's a condensed list of the steps that I took to manually install Tailscale on VMware's Photon OS, though the same (or similar) steps should also work on just about any other systemd-based system.

K8s on vSphere: Building a Kubernetes Node Template With Packer

I've been leveraging the open-source Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes distribution for a little while now, both in my home lab and at work, so I was disappointed to learn that VMware was abandoning the project. TCE had been a pretty good fit for my needs, and now I needed to search for a replacement. VMware is offering a free version of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid as a replacement, but it comes with a license solely for non-commercial use so I wouldn't be able to use it at work.

Gitea: Ultralight Self-Hosted Git Server

I recently started using Obsidian for keeping notes, tracking projects, and just generally organizing all the information that would otherwise pass into my brain and then fall out the other side. Unlike other similar solutions which operate entirely in The Cloud, Obsidian works with Markdown files stored in a local folder1, which I find to be very attractive. Not only will this allow me to easily transfer my notes between apps if I find something I like better than Obsidian, but it also opens the door to using git to easily back up all this important information.

ESXi ARM Edition on the Quartz64 SBC

ESXi-ARM Fling v1.10 Update On July 20, 2022, VMware released a major update for the ESXi-ARM Fling. Among other fixes and improvements, this version enables in-place ESXi upgrades and adds support for the Quartz64's on-board NIC. To update, I: Wrote the new ISO installer to another USB drive. Attached the installer drive to the USB hub, next to the existing ESXi drive. Booted the installer and selected to upgrade ESXi on the existing device.

runtimeterror  


 jbowdre