Ryan's tech blog

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Putting VMs on the same VLAN as your Openshift Cluster

Lately I've been really trying to simplify a lot of things in my lab to reduce the administrative burden of managing my lab, and to save myself time and mental bandwidth - especially when it comes to networking. Coming from a virtualization background, it was pretty common to

Cross Domain Trust between IDM and AD

Cross Domain Trust between IDM and AD

It could be simply because I have many more years managing Active Directory than I do working with RHIDM (Red Hat ID Management, our equivalent product), but I find that AD is a lot easier to set up and use than IDM. However, an increasingly common deployment scheme I'

Openshift, virt-who and Satellite

Openshift, virt-who and Satellite

There are a lot of benefits to running your VMs and containers on a single platform, but from a an economic buyer's standpoint, one of the most compelling reasons to invest in Openshift Virtualization is the fact that it comes with entitlements for unlimited RHEL guests. The way

If at first you don't succeed... RTFM

If at first you don't succeed... RTFM

Okay, admittedly nobody exactly writes an instruction book with step by step instructions on how to modify game consoles in ways their manufacturers really don't want you doing, but if you're brave enough there are certainly some intrepid tinkerers out there who make some content (primarily

What have I gotten myself into...

This project began, as many of mine do, by falling down a rabbit hole. A few months back, my step son decided he wanted to get a Game Boy. I was like... wait, seriously? You know the Game Boy is like 25 years old, the display is shit, has no

A little dust on the bottle

A little dust on the bottle

There is plenty of enterprise grade hardware out there that is still fully functional and far more robust than your average consumer may ever need. In particular, older enterprise network equipment is dirt cheap and plentiful on Ebay, and for a home lab this kind of gear is an absolute

Using OADP for VM Data Protection

Using OADP for VM Data Protection

There are basically only three things in IT that can get you fired; theft, hitting the big red button in the data center and f***ing up the backups Gather round folks, let's put ourselves in the mindset of the typical VMware admin and I will tell you

RHEL + ZFS - The Real TrueNAS Upgrade

RHEL + ZFS - The Real TrueNAS Upgrade

It's been about 2 months since I "upgraded" from TrueNAS Core to TrueNAS Scale, and to be completely honest, it's been a complete disaster. I gave it the old college try, and ultimately I just found TrueNAS Scale to be a mess. I would

Oh No! Someone Griefed my Minecraft Server!

Oh No! Someone Griefed my Minecraft Server!

OADP to the rescue! A couple of days ago, my daughter texted me, "Hey dad, I think someone raided the Minecraft server". So I logged in and sure enough, we'd been griefed. It just so happens that following the GA release of OADP (Openshift APIs for

PXE Booting the Assisted Installer

They say that necessity is the mother of all invention. In my case, it's a combination of impatience and laziness. I wanted to deploy a new Openshift cluster on bare metal, but I didn't want to have to buy a bunch of thumb drives, burn a

More Fun with TrueNAS Scale and Democratic CSI

I recently migrated from TrueNAS Core to TrueNAS Scale. I'm not going to lie, getting to the point where I had all the bugs worked out has been a struggle. Even after I finally managed to get everything working, I was still running into some intermittent issues, particularly

Finally getting my network right

I bought in on the Amazon Alexa ecosystem for my home automation a few years ago for several reasons. While I'm really not a huge fan of Amazon as a company, of the choices out there, Alexa definitely gives you the most options and has a lot of

A Practical Guide to Migration from Gitlab to Gitea

A Practical Guide to Migration from Gitlab to Gitea

First, I just want to say thank you to Gitlab for the many years it has served me quite well. I've pretty much always preferred to run a self hosted git, whether that was due to intellectual property reasons for my job, my general distrust of Microsoft and

Converting from TrueNAS Core to Scale

Converting from TrueNAS Core to Scale

tl;dr - don't. Just don't. 🤦‍♂️ This all started last week when my domain wildcard cert expired and all hell broke loose in my lab. After switching out unbound for dnsmaq, I was finally able to get cert-manager working on my Openshift/OKD clusters and never

OKD for the Homelab

OKD for the Homelab

Honestly, this is not the blog article I wanted to write. I was hoping to be able to give OKD a resounding endorsement and be able to tell you, reader, how awesome and easy to use it is. Unfortunately, my experience in using OKD - for my intended goal, which

Migrating from Unbound to DNSMasq

Migrating from Unbound to DNSMasq

(AKA; I'm sick of all these damned caching issues) I've been using unbound as my DNS server for about as long as I can remember. It has served me well. It's easy to use, and up until recently it has worked well enough. Until

From AI to the Edge - Red Hat Device Edge on a Raspberry Pi 4

I just got back from Red Hat One yesterday and my head is buzzing with all of the exciting new places technology will go in 2024 and beyond. It should come as no surprise to anyone that AI is going to be at the center of it all. If you&

Openshift for the Homelab

I've been working with Openshift 4 pretty much every day for going on 5 years or so now. Before that, I dabbled with Openshift 3, and I've been know to spin up DIY Kubernetes clusters from scratch, so it's easy for me to forget

AMD GPU Passthrough on Openshift

One of my Openshift clusters is Intel, the other is AMD. In terms of CPU, they're pretty well matched - the Intel cluster using i7-7700T CPUs and the AMD cluster equipped with AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 2400GE. They're both 4 core, 8 thread and clock in

Intel GPU Pass Through to Plex on Openshift

Intel GPU Pass Through to Plex on Openshift

About 2 years ago, I started migrating all of my old VM based services to containers, and for the most part the experience has been great. Embracing full app modernization and shifting from servers to containers and microservices has made it faster and easier than ever before to deploy, manage

Project: SNO Leopard

Project: Sno Leopard TL;DR, I installed Openshift 4.12 as a bare metal Single Node Cluster on a 2012 Mac Pro (MacPro5,1 A1289). Specs: 2x Xeon E5645 (6c,12t ea); 24 vCPUs 128 GB DDR3 1333Mhz 1TB NVMe boot drive (SNO) 6x1TB SATA SSD storage (LVM) Radeon RX580

Migrating from pfSense to OPNsense

A few weeks ago, Netgate announced that they were making changes to the support subscriptions for some versions of pfSense (https://www.netgate.com/blog/addressing-changes-to-pfsense-plus-homelab). I’d already been considering switching to another software defined firewall/router OS for some time, this was the kick in the ass I