Category: devops

  • Ansible playbook to start Proxmox hosts

    In my last post, I talked about tagging guests in a Proxmox node so I could easily see which VMs and LXCs I needed to manually start before I ran an Ansible script to run all my apt updates. It would have been reasonable to wonder why I didn’t just add things to my playbook…

  • Proxmox tags to solve a problem

    Each weekend I run an Ansible script that updates all my apt based VMs and containers. For the production machines, that’s everything, but my dev Proxmox is full of half-finished projects. Some of these have IP addresses reserved and are in the Ansible hosts file (because whatever service they are running is almost ready to…

  • apt update – BADSIG 871920D1991BC93C

    I have an ansible script that runs each weekend which basically does an apt update && apt upgrade -Y on every Debian based instance. This weekend it failed on one Ubuntu host. When I went it to try it manually, this was the output: Solved The first google result mentions apt-cache – which I also…

  • Certbot – adding more virtual hosts

    I’ve got a domain that’s not currently used, so I’m going to set it up as a virtual host under NGINX. This server is already serving two domains set up with Certbot for SSL. Is it going to be possible to add another site and have Certbot manage the certificates for it after I’ve run…

  • Certbot & Let’s Encrypt are great

    I’ve been managing SSL certificates for my domains purchased from PorkBun by going there every 90 days downloading the certificates, joining them together to make the fullchain.pem then scp-ing them to my servers. That’s been sort of manageable, but less than ideal. It also doesn’t work for my Australian domains. Since there’s strict rules about…

  • Solved DNS Issues – Proxmox, LXC, Ubuntu, Tailscale

    I’ve picked up an new TP-Link WAP with Omada, so I wanted to spin up an Ubuntu 20.04 LXC to run the controller software in, and ended up spending a couple of hours figuring out why things where not working. The initial problem was I was having connectivity issues pulling down the updates for all…

  • Caching APT updates

    It’s bothered me for a while that all these VM’s are pulling down a lot of the same updates. As well as needlessly using some bandwidth, I’m hammering the update servers (that I don’t pay for) with the same requests over and over. I did briefly consider running my own mirror, but that’s not simple,…

  • Installing service with Ansible

    Having written my little monitoring endpoint in Go, it needs pushed out to all my servers and VM’s. Clearly this is a job for Ansible which I’ve already dabbled my toes in. Before we get onto doing that though, we need to have a think about how to make it a service. Linux Services A…

  • Simple API endpoint in Go

    I’d like a small, quick, low load endpoint on all my nodes and VM’s that exposes a text keyword indicating if that machine is okay for RAM and disk space. I’m currently using Uptime Kuma to monitor if these machines are pingable, but I’d love a tiny bit more information from them so I’d get…

  • Problems backing up LXC to NFS in Proxmox

    If you create an unprivileged LXC container on Proxmox, then try to back it up to an NFS share, for example on a NAS, you’ll get an error when it tries to build the temporary file. The clue is in the Permission denied line. It is trying to create a temporary file on my NAS,…