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    • ESXi Arm Edition on the Quartz64 SBC

      calendar Apr 23, 2022 · 16 min read · vmware linux chromeos homelab tailscale photon vpn  ·
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      ESXi Arm Edition on the Quartz64 SBC

      Up until this point, my homelab has consisted of just a single Intel NUC9 ESXi host running a bunch of VMs. It's served me well but lately I've been thinking that it would be good to have an additional host for some of my workloads. In particular, I'd like to have a Tailscale node on my home network which isn't hosted …


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    • Enable Tanzu CLI Auto-Completion in bash and zsh

      calendar Feb 1, 2022 · 2 min read · vmware linux tanzu kubernetes shell  ·
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      Enable Tanzu CLI Auto-Completion in bash and zsh

      Lately I've been spending some time getting more familiar with VMware's Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes distribution, but I'm still not quite familiar enough with the tanzu command line. If only there were a better way for me to discover the available commands for a given context and help me type them correctly... …


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    • VMware Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes Platform in a Homelab

      calendar Jan 12, 2022 · 23 min read · vmware linux kubernetes docker containers tanzu homelab  ·
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      VMware Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes Platform in a Homelab

      Back in October, VMware announced Tanzu Community Edition as way to provide "a full-featured, easy-to-manage Kubernetes platform that’s perfect for users and learners alike." TCE bundles a bunch of open-source components together in a modular, "batteries included but swappable" way: I've been …


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    • Secure Networking Made Simple with Tailscale

      calendar Jan 1, 2022 · 16 min read · vpn wireguard homelab cloud linux networking security  ·
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      Secure Networking Made Simple with Tailscale

      Not all that long ago, I shared about a somewhat-complicated WireGuard VPN setup that I had started using to replace my previous OpenVPN solution. I raved about WireGuard's speed, security, and flexible (if complex) Cryptokey Routing, but adding and managing peers with WireGuard is a fairly manual (and tedious) …


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    • Snikket Private XMPP Chat on Oracle Cloud Free Tier

      calendar Dec 23, 2021  · edit Mar 17, 2022 · 16 min read · linux cloud docker containers chat  ·
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      Snikket Private XMPP Chat on Oracle Cloud Free Tier

      Non-technical users deserve private communications, too. I shared a few months back about the steps I took to deploy my own Matrix homeserver instance, and I've happily been using the Element client for secure end-to-end encrypted chats with a small group of my technically-inclined friends. Being able to have private …


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    • Cloud-hosted WireGuard VPN for remote homelab access

      calendar Oct 28, 2021 · 21 min read · linux gcp cloud wireguard vpn homelab tasker automation networking security  ·
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      Cloud-hosted WireGuard VPN for remote homelab access

      For a while now, I've been using an OpenVPN Access Server virtual appliance for remotely accessing my homelab. That's worked fine but it comes with a lot of overhead. It also requires maintaining an SSL certificate and forwarding three ports through my home router, in addition to managing a fairly complex software …


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    • Virtually Potato migrated to GitHub Pages!

      calendar Jul 20, 2021 · 4 min read · linux meta chromeos crostini jekyll  ·
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      Virtually Potato migrated to GitHub Pages!

      After a bit less than a year of hosting my little technical blog with Hashnode, I spent a few days migrating the content over to a new format hosted with GitHub Pages. So long, Hashnode Hashnode served me well for the most part, but it was never really a great fit for me. Hashnode's focus is on developer content, …


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    • Script to update image embed links in Markdown files

      calendar Jul 19, 2021 · 2 min read · linux shell regex jekyll meta  ·
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      I'm preparing to migrate this blog thingy from Hashnode (which has been great!) to a GitHub Pages site with Jekyll so that I can write posts locally and then just do a git push to publish them - and get some more practice using git in the process. Of course, I've written some admittedly-great content here and I don't …


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    • Federated Matrix Server (Synapse) on Oracle Cloud's Free Tier

      calendar Jun 28, 2021  · edit Sep 17, 2021 · 15 min read · docker linux cloud containers chat  ·
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      Federated Matrix Server (Synapse) on Oracle Cloud's Free Tier

      I've heard a lot lately about how generous Oracle Cloud's free tier is, particularly when compared with the free offerings from other public cloud providers. Signing up for an account was fairly straight-forward, though I did have to wait a few hours for an actual human to call me on an actual telephone to verify my …


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    • Automatic unattended expansion of Linux root LVM volume to fill disk

      calendar Apr 29, 2021 · 4 min read · linux shell automation  ·
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      Automatic unattended expansion of Linux root LVM volume to fill disk

      While working on my vRealize Automation 8 project, I wanted to let users specify how large a VM's system drive should be and have vRA apply that without any further user intervention. For instance, if the template has a 60GB C: drive and the user specifies that they want it to be 80GB, vRA will embiggen the new VM's …


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    • Setting up Linux on a new Lenovo Chromebook Duet (bonus arm64 complications!)

      calendar Oct 27, 2020  · edit May 20, 2021 · 8 min read · chromeos linux crostini docker shell containers  ·
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      Setting up Linux on a new Lenovo Chromebook Duet (bonus arm64 complications!)

      I've written in the past about the Linux setup I've been using on my Pixel Slate. My Slate's keyboard stopped working over the weekend, though, and there don't seem to be any replacements (either Google or Brydge) to be found. And then I saw that Walmart had the 64GB Lenovo Chromebook Duet temporarily marked down to a …


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    • Fixing WSL2 connectivity when connected to a VPN with wsl-vpnkit

      calendar Oct 7, 2020 · 2 min read · windows linux wsl vpn  ·
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      Fixing WSL2 connectivity when connected to a VPN with wsl-vpnkit

      I was pretty excited to get WSL2 and Docker working on my Windows 10 1909 laptop a few weeks ago, but I quickly encountered a problem: WSL2 had no network connectivity when connected to my work VPN. Well, that's not entirely true; Docker worked just fine, but nothing else could talk to anything outside of the WSL …


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    • 3D Modeling and Printing on Chrome OS

      calendar Sep 14, 2020 · 4 min read · linux chromeos crostini 3dprinting  ·
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      3D Modeling and Printing on Chrome OS

      I've got an Ender 3 Pro 3D printer, a Raspberry Pi 4, and a Pixel Slate. I can't interface directly with the printer over USB from the Slate (plus having to be physically connected to things is like so lame) so I installed Octoprint on the Raspberry Pi and connected that to the printer's USB interface. This gave me a …


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    • Finding the most popular IPs in a log file

      calendar Sep 13, 2020 · 3 min read · linux shell logs regex  ·
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      I found myself with a sudden need for parsing a Linux server's logs to figure out which host(s) had been slamming it with an unexpected burst of traffic. Sure, there are proper log analysis tools out there which would undoubtedly make short work of this but none of those were installed on this hardened system. So this …


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    • BitWarden password manager self-hosted on free Google Cloud instance

      calendar Sep 26, 2018  · edit Mar 6, 2022 · 6 min read · docker linux cloud gcp security  ·
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      BitWarden password manager self-hosted on free Google Cloud instance

      A friend mentioned the BitWarden password manager to me yesterday and I had to confess that I'd never heard of it. I started researching it and was impressed by what I found: it's free, open-source, feature-packed, fully cross-platform (with Windows/Linux/MacOS desktop clients, Android/iOS mobile apps, and browser …


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    John Bowdre

    Wrangler of imaginary computers.
    VMware vExpert
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    Featured Posts

    • VMware Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes Platform in a Homelab
    • Secure Networking Made Simple with Tailscale
    • Burn an ISO to USB with the Chromebook Recovery Utility
    • Setting up Linux on a new Lenovo Chromebook Duet (bonus arm64 complications!)

    Recent Posts

    • Getting Started with the vRealize Automation REST API
    • ESXi Arm Edition on the Quartz64 SBC
    • Download Web Folder Contents with Powershell (wget -r replacement)
    • Active Directory authentication in Tanzu Community Edition
    • Nessus Essentials on Tanzu Community Edition
    • Bulk Import vSphere dvPortGroups to phpIPAM

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