Media efficiency and cost effectiveness..

So if you are like me (and that might be a stretch...as I'm a complete tech nerd!!) you store a lot of your own media, in films and TV series and host your own media server. Think running your own Netflix with thousands of films and TV

RabbitMQ Protection with Kasten

I recently wrote an article covering off how we handle the backup & restore of Kafka via the Strimzi operator. A colleague of mine mentioned the other popular messaging application, RabbitMQ, and wondered if it would work in the same fashion, so I decided to spin up an MQ cluster

Kasten Backup & Restore of the Strimzi Kafka Operator

Kafka Data Protection & The Problem Kafka is a very popular platform for data flow and pipelining within the enterprise space, especially in Kubernetes environments, where data needs to be shared often between namespaces, pods, applications and clusters. It does pose challenges when assessing it's data protection needs.

Simple MFA with OTP for Kubernetes Applications

The Problem One of the greatest advantages of running containerised applications under Kubernetes is that it's very easy to just spin up applications from places such as docker hub almost at will. Therein lies the problem. Whether the application is exposed internally or externally, it will typically require

Migration of Virtual Machines from VMware to OpenShift 4

Overview With the ongoing controversy around Broadcom's acquisition of VMWare and subsequent changes to pricing and partner eco-systems, many customer are looking at their options around their virtualisation provider. Most solid alternatives consist of the same type 2 hypervisor technology, products such as Nutanix, Hyper-V and Proxmox. However

Docker Images and Global Credentials in OpenShift

I recently fell foul of the docker rate limiting that was introduced back in 2020. It specifically rates anonymous pulls to 100 per IP endpoint within a 6 hour period. Now normally this is not an issue....except if you have a power outage overnight!!! My lab UPS shut everything

New Year...New Server

So my old Z620 is getting a bit long in the tooth and I've noticed that some of the more intense jobs I have running are taking a very long time to execute, so I have decided to do a bit of an upgrade cycle. As my lab

Portable Images & Offline Installs...

One question I always get asked is how do we do offline installs. Imagine a situation where your business blocks certain websites and you cannot download an application container images to your local laptop for pushing to an air gapped repository. If your k8s cluster is fully air gapped, it

The evolution of a homelab...

I’ve been running a home lab now for a number of years and it was always a bit amateurish in my own eyes, mainly based around VMs and docker. With branching out into the Kubernetes world, I switched most of it up to run on k3s, but found the

SSH Honeypot results

So after leaving the honeypot up for one week it attracted almost 41000 attacks, including 21000 from a single IP address. The below list is the source countries and number of attacks ranked by size. There is no surprise where the bulk of the attacks came from but I was

Revisiting the SSH honeypot

Last year I ran a simple experiment to open up an SSH honeypot from my home lab and see where from and how many times it got “tickled”. Whilst it worked ok, I wasn’t really happy with the visualisation of the data, it was a bit poor, so I

Things you see whilst out on your bike....

Went out for a quick ride at lunchtime with my mate and stopped off at the local airfield for a bite in their cafe. What did we see parked on the apron but two Apache AH-64D attack helicopters. Inside the cafe were the lads from the Army Air Corp tucking

Discovering Kubevirt..

I recently saw that kubevirt has reached version 1 and wanted to try it out. Kubevirt is basically running traditional virtual machines inside containers and can be incredibly useful for VDI type implementations, dynamic provisioning and auto-scaling environments as the programmatic control afforded by a Kubernetes environment is very powerful

Scripting cloud detection..

The last iteration of the auto deployment script threw up an interetsting question, how to recognise if a script is running on a cloud VM, local VM or physical machine? This is important as the script used curl against an external source (ifconfig.io) to determine the external IP. This

Kasten K10 Guide for beginners – Part 3

Well I got a big response to the update yesterday…with plenty of requests for the additional items of minio and a basic app, so I have updated the script to allow for local minio deployment and rollout of a pacman application locally. The pacman app is a basic demo

Kasten K10 Guide for beginners – Part 2

I’ve been asked by multiple people to amend my install script from part 2 of this series to allow for fully testing K10 by allowing for storageclass migrations on a single host. Therefore I have updated it to install both OpenEBS ZFS Operator and Rancher Longhorn storage classes. Longhorn

Kasten K10 Guide for beginners - Part 1

In order to make it easier for customers to get up and running with a test cluster scenario, ie lab setup, I decided to script up the install process and make it as hands off as possible. I’ve hosted this all on GitHub so it can be called via

Xmas 200 Ride....Done

A pretty tough day but thankfully the weather gods were with us. I suppose compared to the previous week’s -5c, 4-9c is practically tropical. We set off in the dark at 630am and it took a full hour before the sun came up then trucked on until 65kms in

2nd 200km ride done...but this one took a toll

So I managed to complete Novembers 200km ride yesterday, but with some issues. Whilst the weather was kinder the course was a lot lumpier with an additional 800m of climbing on a route that never really had any flat sections. It was up and down all day. We set off

Containerised Web Server using NGINX and SSH

So my son Joe, 12, wants to learn HTML, python, CSS and java….so I wanted to build him a web server he can use as a test bed. Initially I just built him an EC2 instance on t2.micro using the free tier. This was until I realised that

Some days you're the hammer, other days the nail. Today I'm a hammer.

Just got back from my first 200km ride of the winter in prep for the 312 next year. We couldn’t have picked a worse day for the weather this week. It started raining around 10am and poured down for 4 hours, meaning both Nick and I were soaked to

First 200km Ride..

So I need to be doing long distance rides to up my endurance. I have been working on my fitness on the turbo by doing intervals and sweet spot training on Zwift, however there is no substitution for doing long distances to get prepared for a long event. I will

List Of Home Services I Run..

These run over a local Docker host (on my ubuntu desktop) or on the k8s cluster, depending upon resource requirements. . PiHole – local DNS and adblocking. WordPress – This blog. BudgE – Budget Software (very useful in today’s cost of living crisis). Cloud9 – My own personal IDE environment. Emby – A Movie / TV

A Great Example Of The Day To Come

This video from an English vlogger is a great example of the typical 312 experience. The 1st 160km is stunning, hilly and beautiful…the 2nd 160km…not so much, although it’s mostly flat. I think if I can get over the mountains in a reasonable state, then all things

Self-hosting..

So this blog…whats it running on? Well the obvious choice is to host in the cloud of course, but where’s the fun in that? I run this on a single node K8S cluster made up from a old Lenovo thinkcentre micro picked up for less that £100 (quad