Homelab

Wendell over at Level1Techs had a brief aside in one of his Level1Linux weekly videos about IKEA’s smart home devices, including a temperature and air quality sensor that is fairly decent available for cheap. On a lark, I decided to grab a collection of devices and try them out, and I’ve been very happy with the experience so far. I’ll talk about what devices I tried out and my experience with them first, and then I’ll talk a little bit about how I have adopted smart home devices, and why I’m a fan of the tech being used with these IKEA devices. ...

I recently came across a magical little project called buttervolume, a Docker Volume plugin that manages your Docker (and potentially Podman) Volumes as BTRFS subvolumes. It solves a problem I’ve had with OCI container hosted workloads for years - enabling migration of centralized storage volumes between discrete systems. VM orchestrators handle volume migration better… …or I gues more accurately, they can actually do it. I’ve been hosting services for almost my entire career. I cut my teeth on Linux and web server hosting at a local ISP and hosting provider just out of high school. And yet, I still remember the magic that I experienced when I had my first VMWare vSphere deployment. Not only was it possible to easily host multiple servers on the same system, it was possible to move those virtual servers between hosts. Gone were the days when hardware maintenance was tied to extended down times. Server migration between hosts was a quick and easy process. And it was good. ...

A saga of home ISP outages, the benefits of keeping old gear around, and configuring automatic Internet failover complete with notifications.