OpenWRT on a Linksys E8450 We got a new router and decided to re-flash it with OpenWRT. The openwrt page for the E8450 covers the current support status. We went with the “non-UBI” installation because… The caveat is that this change is essentially permanent so once you have OpenWRT, I hope you like it (I’m sure you will ;-). The [official page](Since 2021-08-27, it is no longer possible to keep the default vendor flash layout (a.

Linux Installers and Serial Connections This is an update of a previous post where I argued for the importance of being able to control virtual machines using serial lines as an out-of-band tool. I still think that this is an important thing to do and this post gathers some updated examples. UEFI Boot and Mirrored Disks - almalinux This example is a test-bed for a physical (non-VM) install I needed to do on a system which uses UEFI and where we wanted RAID1 support.

Hippo Toes This is a follow-up to my earlier post on running gitlab-ce on a qnap NAS using nginx and letsencrypt. The basic ideas are discussed in that post. This post achieves the same result but via docker compose. The resulting docker-compose file is available in this repository. docker-compose We will use version 3 of docker-compose. I’m not a docker-compose expert, and I’m quite lazy so there are probably better ways of doing this (e.

I’ve been experimenting with glacier from aws to backup some of our content. The glacier service sounds very attractive (great durability, uptime etc.) but the pricing can be quite difficult to pick apart. This post documents an experiment to see how it might work for us and to get an idea of any potential costs. I think everything I want to do will fit in the free tier, but time will tell!

Linux Installers and Serial Connections From time to time I still find the need to install virtual machines over a serial connection. I configure a serial console on ALL of my virtual machines as an out-of-band management option for when I screw up their network config, so it seems natural to want to install them using a serial connection as well. One advantage this brings is that I don’t forget to leave them configured with an unnecessary and potentially problematic VNC server configured after install.

Using libvirt as a terraform provider I’ve gotten comfortable with terraform using the openstack provider to build infrastructure. At home, I don’t have openstack, but I do have libvirt. The terraform-provider-libvirt plugin allows terraform to talk directly with libvirt to manage new resources. The main problem I faced with this setup is I don’t know go at all, so installing the plugin was a bit of a chore. The instructions below are the first thing that worked and might not be correct.

Using Network UPS Tools for Controlled Shutdowns I’ve used apcupsd quite a lot, and intended to use it to protect our qnap, but but the default on qnap is to use a system called NUT. The two are quite similar so the transition wasn’t too hard; the main problem was trying to remember I wasn’t running apcupsd. QNAP configuration The package was already installed on the qnap, so all there was to do was plug in the UPS (an APC Back-UPS 550G and navigate to the config section `Control Panel -> External Device-> UPS.

Themes as submodules This is well documented elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean I can remember it, or where to find it. The theme for this site is added as a git submodule. That means that when you checkout the repository and run hugo you’ll end up with a blank white page because the theme directory is empty. The submodule(s) must be initialized and updated before they will be found, e.g.

LEDE and DHPD We’re now using LEDE on our main router (a WNDR3800). I end up accessing it remotely quite a bit so this page just collects together a few commonly used (but easily forgotten) commands. Add A New DHCP Host I quite like bridging the KVM hosts on fyodor onto the main network for development. To add a new DHCP entry on the router, something like the following should work

Update 2019-03-21 The steps below have been implemented with docker-compose in this post Hippo Toes We want to run the GitLab CE docker container on our QNAP and access it over HTTPS. One way to do this is to use nginx to proxy connections through to the github container with SSL termination happening in nginx. If we use the nginx-proxy container and docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion we can automate the management of the certificates associated with the gitlab.