Posts

Wherein I talk about a small tool for access log analysis on the terminal. I recently re-discovered a small tool I already came across a while ago, but never wrote a post about: Goaccess. It’s a command line tool which can be used to do quick analysis of web server access logs. It understands some of the standard formats from e.g. Apache out of the box, but also provides facilities to parse other log formats. In this post, I will use it to parse 30 GB worth of logs from my public-facing Traefik instance and see what I can get out of it. ...

Wherein I update my Turing Pi 2 boards to a new firmware. During the migration of my Homelab to a fleet of Raspberry Pi 4, I bought two Turing Pi 2 boards and put eight Raspberry Pi CM4 8GB into them. You can read more about my setup here. The board has a nice Board Management Controller (BMC). It is an Allwinner SoC with 128 MB of RAM and 128 MB of flash for the OS. It’s running an embedded Linux distribution. This BMC implements a few interesting features: ...

Wherein I show you around one of my personal projects for logging smokes. I know there’s been a dearth of Homelab posts and projects recently, and that’s because I’m currently learning the Go programming language and some web development. Today, I’d like to tell you why. I’m a smoker, and have been for over 20 years now. About ten years back, I was feeling like I was getting close to lighting the next cigarette on the last glimmer of the previous one. I was in the habit of smoking inside my small flat during University. And I felt I was smoking too much. ...

Wherein I let my kubectl certs expire and implement some monitoring. A couple of days ago, I was getting through my list of small maintenance tasks in my Kubernetes cluster. Stuff like checking the resource consumption of new deployments and adapting the resource limits. And in the middle of it, one of my kubectl invocations was greeted by this message: error: You must be logged in to the server (Unauthorized) So I had a look at my kubectl credentials. For those who don’t know, kubectl authenticates to the cluster with a client TLS cert by default. I had just copied the admin.conf config file kubeadm helpfully creates during cluster setup. I didn’t really see any reason to set up anything more elaborate, considering that I’m the only admin in the cluster. ...

First post in the new sysadmin category. I’ve recently realized that I’ve never written about how I’m running my desktop setup on Linux. Triggered by having to revamp one of my Gentoo portage ebuilds for my desktop, let me remedy this and tell you a bit about what my personal computing outside the Homelab looks like. My Linux journey started back in 2007. I was about to start my computer science degree. And I had allowed myself one month between finishing the then mandatory military service and some jobs to bridge the time before University and my program starting in October. At the beginning of September, I got my first University laptop, an Acer TravelMate 5720 Core 2 Duo with an ATI GPU and Windows Vista. Receiving that laptop, I thought to myself: Any real CS student should be running Linux. ...