Category: Technology
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Replacing ISY with Home Assistant – Part 1 – Preparation
This will hopefully be a short series on migrating away from my ancient ISY994. They killed it! I have had an ISY994 since early 2018, and it has served me well. It is the core communicator with my Insteon and Z-Wave devices. However, Universal Devices is killing it in favor of their eisy device. Now,…
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When browsers have a mind of their own…
I recently implemented Cloudflare on my domains to allow me some protection on my domains. There were some unintended side effects, and it seems to have to do with my browser’s DNS. Internal Site Management All of my mattgerega.com and mattgerega.org sites are available outside of my network, so putting Cloudflare in front as a…
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Literally every time I go away…
It really truly seems like every time I go away, something funny happens in the lab and stuff goes down. That pattern continued last week. Loads of Travel A previously planned Jamaican getaway butted up against a short-notice business meeting in Austin. Since I could not get a direct flight to either location, I ended…
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Speed. I.. am.. Speed.
“One winner, 42 losers. I eat losers for breakfast. Breakfast? Maybe I should have had breakfast. A little brekie could be good for me….” My quest for speed lead to using 1TB of data every day…
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Going Banana
That’s right… just one banana. I have been looking to upgrade the Raspberry PI 3 that has been operating as home lab’s reverse proxy. While it would have been more familiar to find another Raspberry Pi 4 to use, their availability is, well, terrible. I found a workable, potentially more appropriate, solution in the Banana…
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Speeding up Packer Hyper-V Provisioning
I spent a considerable amount of time working through the provisioning scripts for my RKE2 nodes. Each node took between 25-30 minutes to provision. I felt like I could do better. Check the tires A quick evaluation of the process quickly made me realize that most of the time is spent in the full install…
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A big mistake and a bit of bad luck…
In the Home Lab, things were going good. Perhaps a little too good. A bonehead mistake on my part and hardware failure combined to make another ridiculous weekend. I am beginning to think this blog is becoming “Matt messed up again.” Permissions are a dangerous thing I wanted to install the Azure DevOps agent on…
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Tech Tips – Moving away from k8s-at-home
Much of what I learned about Helm charting and running workloads in Kubernetes I credit to the contributors over at k8s-at-home. There expansive chart collection helped me start to jump in to Kubernetes. Last year, they announced they were deprecating their repositories. I am not surprised: the sheer volume of charts they had meant they…
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Automated RKE2 Cluster Management
One of the things I like about cloud-hosted Kubernetes solutions is that they take the pain out of node management. My latest home lab goal was to replicate some of that functionality with RKE2. Did I do it? Yes. Is there room for improvement? Of course, its a software project. The Problem With RKE1, I…
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Moving On: Testing RKE2 Clusters in the Home Lab
After recovering from an RKE crash, I figured it was time to look into different Kubernetes options. I ended up with a new offering from a familiar friend.