Matt Gerega

Category: Technology

  • Kubernetes Observability, Part 1 – Collecting Logs with Loki

    This post is part of a series on observability in Kubernetes clusters: Part 1 – Collecting Logs with Loki (this post) Part 2 – Collecting Metrics with Prometheus Part 3 – Dashboards with Grafana Part 4 – Using Linkerd for Service Observability Part 5 – Using Mimir for long-term metric storage I have been spending…

  • An Impromptu Home Lab Disaster Recovery Session

    It has been a rough 90 days for my home lab. We have had a few unexpected power outages which took everything down. And, for the unexpected outages, things came back up. Over the weekend, I was doing some electrical work outside, wiring up outlets and lighting. Being safety conscious, I killed the power to…

  • Nginx Reverse proxy: A slash makes all the difference.

    I have been doing some work to build up some standard processes for Kubernetes. ArgoCD has become a big part of that, as it allows us to declaratively manage the state of our clusters. After recovering from a small blow-up in the home lab (post coming), I wanted to migrate my cluster tools to utilize…

  • The cascading upgrade continues…

    I mentioned in a previous post that I made the jump to Windows 11 on both my work and home laptops. As it turns out, this is causing me to re-evaluate some of my other systems and upgrade them as needed. Old (really old) Firmware The HP ProLiant Gen8 Server I have been running for…

  • Breaking an RKE cluster in one easy step

    With the release of Ubuntu’s latest LTS release (22.04, or “Jammy Jellyfish), I wanted to upgrade my Kubernetes nodes from 20.04 to 22.04. What I had hoped would be an easy endeavor turned out to be a weeks-long process with destroyed clusters and, ultimately, an ETCD issue. The Hypothesis As I viewed it, I had…

  • GitOps: Moving from Octopus to … Octopus?

    Well, not really, but I find it a bit cheeky that ArgoCD’s icon is, in fact, an orange octopus. There are so many different ways to provision and run Kubernetes clusters that, without some sense of standardization across the organization, Kubernetes can become an operations nightmare. And while a well-run operations environment can allow application…

  • Tech Tip – Turn on forwarded headers in Nginx

    I have been using Nginx as a reverse proxy for some time. In the very first iteration of my home lab, it lived on a VM and allowed me to point my firewall rules to a single target, and then route traffic from there. It has since been promoted to a dedicated Raspberry Pi in…

  • ISY and the magic network gnomes

    For nearly 2 years, I struggled mightily with communication issues between my ISY 994i and some of my docker images and servers. So much, in fact, that I had a fairly long running post in the Universal Devices forums dedicated to the topic. I figure it is worth a bit of a rehash here, if…

  • Lab time is always time well spent.

    The push to get a website out for my wife brought to light my neglect of my authentication site, both in function and style. As one of the ongoing projects at work has been centered around Identity Server, a refresher course would help my cause. So over the last week, I dove into my Identity…

  • Packer.io : Making excess too easy

    A story on how what I thought would be a simple migration to Azure DevOps turned into tools that support my experimentation habit.