Category: homelab

  • BOINC in an LXC container

    Years ago, I was very keen on the SETI@home project that used a distributed computing model whereby packets of digitized received radio data were farmed out to individuals’ computers to be processed to look for any unusual signals that could potentially be from an intelligent extra-terrestrial source. That’s long since defunct, but the idea lives…

  • 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,…

  • Use VS Code to work on remote files

    If you’ve got a script, or some code to work on, and it’s on a VM somewhere, you can always ssh in and use nano or vim to make your edits. Like a caveman. With an archaic editor, no intellisense, and no spell checking. Or…. This magic – of editing a files on a remote…

  • Disable SSH root logins

    This always makes me laugh: It’s like half the traffic on the internet is bots trying random passwords on root accounts over ssh. This is on an Ubuntu VPS on BinaryLane that had only been spun up five minutes or so. Looks like about one attempt every 10 seconds. This is why the number three…

  • Lightweight Web Servers

    I’ve been using the excellent Uptime Kuma for my monitoring, but a couple of recent incidents – an external USB mount disappeared on a remote machine, an NVME drive filled up on a different node and stopped backups working because of a configuration error – have made me start to think about more robust monitoring.…

  • Testing Storage Speed

    Now I’ve added NVME drives to my nodes, plus added an external NMVE RAID, I’ve got quite the collection of storage options. For one of my nodes, it looks like this: For my dev VM’s I often set them up to have their storage on the NAS – it’s just super easy to move them…