Matt Gerega

Category: Technology

  • 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.

  • Home Lab: Disaster Recovery and time for an Upgrade!

    It never fails that something breaks when I am on vacation. It wasn’t until I returned that I realized how extensive the damage was, and how my haste to fix it made it worse.

  • Simple Site Monitoring with Raspberry PI and Python

    My off-hours time this week has been consumed by writing some Python scripts to help monitor uptime for some of my sites. Build or Buy? At this point in my career, “build or buy” is a question I ask more often than not. As a software engineer, there is no shortage of open source and…

  • Hardening your Kubernetes Cluster: Don’t run as root!

    People sometimes ask my why I do not read for pleasure. As my career entails ingesting the NSA/CISA technical report on Kubernetes Hardening Guidance and translating it into actionable material, I ask that you let me enjoy hobbies that do not involve the written word.

  • Moving the home lab to Kubernetes

    If it’s not broke, don’t fix it, right? In the world of software, sometimes the path forward involves breaking the old things first.

  • Ubuntu and Docker…. Oh Snap!

    A few months ago, I made the decision to start building my my .NET Core side projects from as Linux-based containers instead of Windows-based containers.  These projects are mostly CRUD APIs, meaning none of them require the Windows based containers.  And, quite frankly, Linux is cheaper…. Now, I had previously built out a few Ubuntu…