Category: devops

  • Error wiping old drive in Proxmox

    When I popped in an NVME drive and freshly installed Proxmox to it, I assumed I’d just be able to wipe the SDD that had previously been the boot drive to set it up as a ZFS pool. However, when I tried to do the wipe, I was greeted with the error: I assume this…

  • Installing a Node app on a server

    Before I write a fancy Ansible playbook to automatically set up the Nginx/Node combo on my web servers, it might be worth going through how to deploy a Node app so it can run on a server without you being logged in. Until now, I’ve been running my tests on my laptop, or in a…

  • Digital Ocean first impressions

    I’ve been thinking about the time it takes me to provision a guest VM in Proxmox. I seem to remember on BinaryLane it was seconds rather than minutes. This seemed to be a good excuse to use the free credit I’ve heard about for Linode or Digital Ocean hundreds of times in podcast adverts, so…

  • Ansible with Secrets

    We wrote a nice little Ansible playbook the other day to install nginx on our web servers and ensure it was running. We were able to store the usernames in the hosts inventory file using the ansible_ssh_user variable. Then, we ran the playbook with the command: ansible-playbook web_installs.yaml –ask-become-pass This asked us the password to…

  • Finding the host IP from inside a Docker container

    Having successfully set up and tested my node.js api handling app behind nginx on a development VM in the homelab, I decided to move it to my VPS so I could start using it for real. I had a bit of trouble finding the nginx.conf files on the VPS, until I remembered I was running…

  • nginx in Front of a node.js app

    NGINX is a great webserver and reverse proxy – as in it can hand off requests to other web-servers. That’s the situation I want to have set up on my VPS. I want NGINX to handle incoming requests – some of them will just be sorted out by returning static HTML, others (like the weather…

  • First Ansible Playbook

    In the previous post, we looked at getting up and running with Ansible, including using the ad-hoc mode to send commands to our servers. We had a inventory file called hosts that had groups of server IP addresses and a simple ansible.cfg file that pointed to our inventory file. Playbooks Ansible playbooks are used to…

  • Proxmox 8.0 Install

    I’m normally a x.1 release type of sysadmin, but the increasing temptation of installing Proxmox 8.0 while I’ve got some time off, and the fact that I’ve got a cluster, so I can just move the VM’s around all adds up to thinking I’ll do that today. Here’s how my system works. It consists of…

  • Getting Started with Ansible

    Ansible is a system for executing commands on remote systems. It allows a declarative approach – so if you run a playbook (the system configuration files are called playbooks) that says a system has a Docker container running Jellyfin, Ansible will check if that’s true, and if not, make it so. Ansible is best used…

  • How to recover a docker run command

    Imagine if, lets say hypothetically, you’d set up an application months ago with a docker run command. Then you’d heard there had been an update to the app because of a security update. So you need to stop/remove the container, pull a new image and restart it, trouble is, you don’t remember the exact run…