I recently got a new laptop with arch linux on it, and I was noticing that if I forgot to plug my charging cable for the night and came back a day later, I would lose a big chunk of battery charge overnight. My laptop enters the sleep state when idle, and by running cat /sys/power/mem_sleep I can see the sleep states that are compatible with my system… in my case, I only have an s2idle option and nothing else.
I have slowly building up my Terraform-on-proxmox chops, and my next challenge was to build a kubernetes cluster via Terraform. I had done something similar at one of my previous jobs, where I was building code to bootstrap RKE2 k8s nodes into Nutanix and VxRail (vSphere) virtual environments.
My top-of-the-house router, the one that connects to my ISP, is a pfSense router running on netgate hardware. I’ve slowly modified it over the years, and now it does a lot for me:
In order to get more practice with advanced networking topics, I wanted to have ways for me to quickly spin up router VMs that I can test with. After doing some googling I decided on vyos as my router of choice for now. For the “quick” part I planned on using Terraform with Proxmox (the hypervisor I use at home).
This all started because I wanted a way to be able to create persistent volume claims on locally hosted kubernetes cluster. I originally had longhorn installed on my cluster for this, but I wanted to try something else. I looked into a project that implemented a proxmox CSI for kubernetes, but it seemed to have some limitations on migration and seemed intimidating to install. Ceph on the other hand, had a nice blue button on the proxmox UI that I could click to try, and it seemed easy enough to at least dip my toes in the water. I didn’t have anything important running on my cluster at the moment (which is why I was able to just delete longhorn without issue), so it was a good time to experiment.
Over the past couple of years, I have been incrementally repurposing old hardware, mostly laptops, by installing proxmox on them and then running VMs, LXCs, and containers on there. I am writing this post to consolidate some notes I had about proxmox setup.
I had an issue where I had factory reset my GoPro and forgot to change the datetime before using the camera. The result is that I was left with a bunch of videos that were timestamped as being from 2015. In order to fix this, I first tried ffmpeg, but found that it was not getting me the metadata I wanted. Next I tried exiftool and got some success.
This is a collection of notes that I took while I was learning Rust from the rust book website.
This is a collection of miscellaneous notes I took while taking a Udemy course on Kubernetes.
I’ve recently ran into some situations where things on my proxmox server were failing, and I had no idea about it until later because I didn’t check my proxmox frequently enough. To help resolve this, I set up a few forms of email logging on my proxmox server.
Miscellanous log of ZFS issues I have had over the years.
Setting up an SMB server in a Proxmox LXC can be a little tricky if you want to do it the “safe” way in a non-privileged container. I put together some notes on how I set up my instance.
these are things that I had to do to get docker working the way i want on an lxc container.
I bought a Cisco SG-300 off Newegg so that I could get more familiarity with Cisco switches. In hindsight, I wish I picked a switch that was more geared towards network professionals, because some of the commands are different and the feature set is not as big. However I still had a great learning experience using the switch.
I feel like some of my computer-related problems become so much easier to solve when I realize that everything is just code, and code can be adjusted/fixed.
Today I am working on adding functionality on my website for users to add comments. some people have already done this, but I decided to not go with their way and just use the bare-bones github issues functionality without much interfacing.
Last week, I made a post about my project for command-line encryption and decrpytion of Outlook emails using a smart card. A day before I worked on that project, I was actually working on another, tangentially related project relating to encryption and openssl.
At my current workplace, emails are frequently frequently encrypted/decrypted in Microsoft Outlook, using a smart card that is issued to every employee. At work, we primarily use Windows, and either the default Microsoft authentication tools or middleware such as ActivClient are used in order to interface with our smart cards / smart card readers. Until I started this project yesterday, I had only ever used GUI applications in order to do anything related to my smartcard.
OpenCV (open computer vision) is a c++ project devoted to computer vision applications. For this weekend project, I was specifically looking into how it could be used in an Android application. To start off, I read through the OpenCV android tutorials located here and here. Unfortunately, these tutorials referenced an older version of Android Studio… (nowadays, there’s a fancy new Android studio that even has a dark mode!)… so I had to try my best to translate outdated instructions towards the new stuff.
Doing more work with Ubuntu on windows. I accidentally overwrote my Ubuntu on Windows installation, deleting all of my Linux files! Oh well. Since I’m starting from scratch, I am working on getting things back to working again, starting with Jekyll and GitHub/Gitlab.
Wow, haven’t updated blog in like two years. Right now I am trying to install gedit on the “Ubuntu on Windows” feature of Windows 10. I was able to get it installed with “sudo apt-get install gedit,” but it still wasn’t working correctly… something about a gconf file not working. I wasn’t able to change any of my preferences! After googling the problem for about two hours, I think my issue is that I haven’t installed gnome yet! I guess that’s a required thing, considering that gedit is a gnome application.
I’m trying to make jekyll on github pages work nicely with my website host, and it’s rather confusing. I thought I had it all figured out yesterday, but I decided to do something else so I’ve been working on that for the past few hours. I want the jekyll site to appear at www.xoid.us, but I want all my old stuff to appear somewhere, like old.xoid.us. But in the process of doing that, I suddenly was unable to access my cpanel, or any non-jekyll part of my site! Pinging it did not work! But wait! If I check the status of the website on sites like site24x7.com, it shows that it works. I just tried opening the site on my phone’s 4G internet connection, and it works. So I think that the hosting company may have blocked my IP address for some reason… So anyways, I finished up the DNS editing on my phone, and now I think everything works as I expected!
All right, so I made my website. Took me forever to figure out how to do all sorts of things… First, I learned how to use git. Then, I learned how to install jekyll and get it to display a website on localhost. After that, I had to figure out how to redirect the github URL to xoid.us, and that was the worst part, because I never knew what my A and CNAME changes did, because of caching and stuff! Well anyways, it turned out it worked. Up until this point I had been doing everything in linux! I had originally started in windows, with the Github GUI and Powershell, but I was so confused and lost that I just started from scratch by learning from the git reference website online. The tutorial had linux commands in their examples so I used the linux partition on my laptop. That turned out pretty well.
So anyways, after I was getting nowhere with the CNAME record stuff, I rebooted and switched back to windows, and checked xoid.us in the browser…. and it worked!! After that, I made a short CV draft page and started adding a blog thing. I have noticed that the powershell and the github GUI is a lot easier to use now that I kind of understand what git is.