https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/tags/homelab/ Recent content in Homelab on shan's blog Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sat, 02 Dec 2023 19:29:48 +0100 https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/new-server-round-2/ Sat, 02 Dec 2023 19:29:48 +0100 https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/new-server-round-2/ Intro Last time I mentioned that my ZimaBoard 832 server died on me. Let’s see how someone with a small homelab can manage these kind of situations. D(isaster) I was not at home when the server died. As Rule #0, I think we can safely say that these things always happen when you cannot access the hardware physically. The first thing to keep in mind is that it’s not a good idea to put all your eggs in the same basket. https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/moar-e-mail-notifications/ Sun, 29 Oct 2023 18:04:26 +0100 https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/moar-e-mail-notifications/ Recap So, last time I was able to configure an e-mail notification for the router logins, using my iCloud e-mail and Apple’s SMTP server. This gave me a boost to play around with other equipment and services I have. Next victim: my Ubuntu VM I wanted to keep an eye on my Ubuntu docker VM so it was the next logical subject for this experiment. I needed a local SMTP server which is able to use Apple’s SMTP, since I still don’t have the urge to host my own. https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/how-i-do-notifications/ Tue, 03 Oct 2023 20:52:31 +0200 https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/how-i-do-notifications/ Intro A lot of self-hosted software I use offer notification options and I do like to play with these, but getting the different implementations to work in a unified way can be a pain in the ass. I’d like to show you in this post how I arrived at my current solution and what other options I used along the way. The basic problem I have is that I always want to know what happens in my systems and take action if needed. https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/headless-virtualbox-webui/ Sat, 13 May 2023 18:40:42 +0200 https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/headless-virtualbox-webui/ Back to the VMs In a previous post I wrote about installing phpvirtualbox and I thought it’s worth its own post. So… Going headless VirtualBox’s headless mode is really powerful; you can do everything from the command line what you can do from the GUI but sometimes it just makes more sense to click a few times if you want to change some settings. Since I don’t have a display connected to my new server I looked around for a solution to this problem and found phpvirtualbox which seemed to be exactly what I needed. https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/mikrotik-wireguard-errors/ Sun, 30 Apr 2023 14:26:32 +0200 https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/mikrotik-wireguard-errors/ WireGuard why has thou forsaken me I had an issue with my self hosted VPN for a few days now, more to the point, it just stopped working. I run a WireGuard VPN through my MikroTik router and it was surprisingly easy to configure which is not in the standard feature list of MikroTik products. I was suspicious and turns out I had every reason to be. Troubleshooting I like to work my way from the outside in when dealing with problems, I find that it really helps wit pinpointing the exact issue (for me, anyway). https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/headless-virtualbox/ Fri, 28 Apr 2023 21:15:28 +0200 https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/headless-virtualbox/ The adventure continues After I packed full my new server with docker containers, it was time to look for something new to do with it. I decided to install VirtualBox because it will be useful for running Vagrant for learning Ansible (book recommendation Ansible for DevOps by Jeff Geerling) Ubuntu how I (not) missed you First we’ll have to install VirtualBox, but this is not just a simple apt install virtualbox, nooo. https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/new-server-adventures/ Fri, 28 Apr 2023 10:23:28 +0200 https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/new-server-adventures/ Old friend, you are getting annoying I’ve been using a Synology DS216+II since, well… 2016. It still serves me well, I’ve just upgraded its storage capacity the third time, now to 8TB, but it’s clear that it’s getting slow with the current workload I’m putting on it. Currently it has to serve around 30 docker containers beside its standard NAS functions. I find that the 8 GB of RAM I put inside it around 2017 helped a lot and the bottleneck are the HDDs. https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/mikrotik-adblock-with-pihole/ Mon, 28 Nov 2022 13:40:20 +0100 https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/mikrotik-adblock-with-pihole/ My router history As I mentioned earlier, I have a Mikrotik hAP ac3 router. I always liked fine-tuning my routers, the previous one was a TP-Link device with OpenWRT installed on it. I bought the Mikrotik router after much deliberation since I was sure that I have the adequate level of networking knowledge to comfortably play with OpenWRT, RouterOS is a different kind of animal. Oh boy, was I not wrong! https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/offen-docker-volume-backup/ Thu, 10 Nov 2022 19:07:31 +0100 https://blog.sandorkovacs.hu/posts/offen-docker-volume-backup/ Backup revisited In my previous post about container backup I planned to come up with a proper volume backup solution for my home environment. After playing around with various settings and configuration of Offen I decided that I’ll use a dedicated container for each volume I want to back up. I ended up putting the necessary config in a single docker-compose.yml file. This may be redundant and I’m sure there are better ways to do it, but it works for me.