Power Measurements in the Homelab

I’ve long been wondering how much power my Homelab consumes, especially with my switch from a single relatively beefy server to a gaggle of Raspberry Pis. In the end, I put in three smart plugs supporting MQTT. I would have loved to have per-machine power consumption stats, but I didn’t want to invest that much money into smart plugs. To wet your appetite a bit, here is a snapshot of the resulting Grafana dashboard:...

June 13, 2023 · 20 min · Michael
The stylized key keycloak logo

SSO with Keycloak in the Homelab

I wanted to have Single Sign-On (SSO) for as many of my services as possible for quite a while. One of the main triggers was the need for 2FA, in particular for the services accessible externally, to improve general security of my Homelab setup. SSO means that a user only logs in once, and with a single username/password combo, and then gets access to multiple different services with that login. The implementation is based first on OAuth2....

April 24, 2023 · 19 min · Michael

Migrating two Ceph OSDs from one physical hosts to another

Over the weekend, I migrated one of the Ceph VMs in my Homelab over to a physical host. This time around, instead of buying a completely new machine, I recycled most of my old 2018 era home server. It’s an old AMD A10-9700E, meaning the 35W TDP variant. I have noted some thoughts on reusing this old machine here. Mounted in the rack, the machine looks like this: Server mounted in the rack, without Ceph OSD disks attached....

April 23, 2023 · 7 min · Michael
The Audiobookshelf logo, a stack of books on a shelf with headphones over them

Audiobookshelf for Podcasts and Audiobooks

I was recently introduced to the excellent Wolf 359 audio drama. It’s the story of the crew of a space station orbiting a distant star, with good humor and interpersonal drama as well as some suspense/horror sprinkled in. I have a small set of other podcasts as well, first and foremost the great British History Podcast. Up to this point, I had mostly listened on my phone, during train rides, but also via my browser during Saturday morning household chores....

April 12, 2023 · 9 min · Michael

Consul Connect certificate problems

I updated my Nomad and Consul clusters recently. Especially Consul was a large jump, getting from 1.13.5 to 1.15.1. After about three days, I suddenly started getting 500: Internal server error from a lot of my services. In this article, I will be going into the debugging process and explain a little bit about what Consul Connect is and how it works. Why Consul Connect? So Consul Connect, or Consul Service Mesh, creates a sort-of overlay network to connect services running on multiple machines, in a secure manner....

April 2, 2023 · 9 min · Michael