Synchronizing Multiple Piholes with orbital-sync

I run PiHole for ad-blocking on my home network. I’m an SRE in my day job, so of course I’m not running a single instance of something as important as DNS. I also don’t want to have to update things like local DNS entries or blocklists in multiple places, that will cause weird and annoying inconsistencies in my DNS. Enter orbital-sync. ...

December 7, 2024 · 2 min · 406 words · Me

Store NUT metrics in Prometheus so we can display them with Grafana

I ordered a second UPS because thanks to PeaNUT, I saw that my current UPS is only providing 20 minutes of uptime. Unfortunately, as of this post, PeaNUT will only read one UPS’ metrics from Network UPS Tools per PeaNUT instance, so I’m going to start scraping the metrics into Prometheus and displaying them with Grafana. Here’s how I did it. ...

April 21, 2024 · 3 min · 546 words · Me

Setup Prometheus and Grafana in Your Homelab

I wanted nice graphs for the various metrics I collect in my homelab and from my Home Assistant server. Here’s how I installed Prometheus and Grafana in my homelab to get them. ...

April 13, 2024 · 6 min · 1256 words · Me

Set up nut-upsd and peanut in your homelab

Set up nut-upsd and peanut in your homelab I run my Synology server and network switches off a UPS. I decided I wanted a dashboard for the UPS, here’s how I did set up Network UPS Tools, aka NUT, and the PeaNUT dashboard. ...

April 6, 2024 · 5 min · 991 words · Me

Set up nginx-proxy-manager with LetsEncrypt SSL certificates

In the next few posts, I’m going to document how to set up Home Assistant (HA) from scratch. We’re going to want to protect the admin UI interfaces for HA and its support services with SSL, and add authentication to services that don’t provide it themselves. We’re going to do this with Nginx Proxy Manager because it has built in support for using LetsEncrypt to obtain free SSL certificates, supports adding authentication to services that don’t do it themselves, and is overall easy to use. Before I start writing more Home Assitant articles, let’s set up a SSL proxy server to keep everything secure. ...

July 22, 2023 · 10 min · 2101 words · Me

Installing ESPHome

Some of my posts assume that the user already has ESPHome installed, so I’m documenting how to install it here so I don’t have to repeat it everywhere. ...

May 22, 2023 · 2 min · 334 words · Me

Sysadvent 2021 Articles

I wrote two articles in sysadvent 2021 Baking Multi-Architecture Docker Images Setting up k3s in your home lab

December 7, 2021 · 1 min · 18 words · Me

Setting up Shinobi and a Wyze G2 Camera

I wanted to set up a security camera outside, but I didn’t want to be dependent on an outside cloud service - if my internet goes out, I don’t want to lose my ability to record video. Wyze cameras are nice and cheap, and you can reflash them to support RTSP in addition to streaming to the Wyze cloud. ...

March 14, 2021 · 4 min · 785 words · Me

Run a CUPSD print server on Raspberry Pi

I have an old HP 4050N. For a variety of reasons, I want to have it behind a print server instead of having my laptops print directly to it. Here’s how I set that up. ...

February 8, 2021 · 2 min · 354 words · Me

Building Multi Architecture Docker Images with buildx

I’ve got a mix of architectures in my basement cluster - some Odroid HC2s that are arm7, some Raspberry Pi 4s that are arm64, and am soon going to add an Intel node as well. It’s more hassle than it’s worth to have to specify different images for the different architectures. I already build my own copies of images, so I decided to start building all my images as multiarchitecture images. ...

June 13, 2020 · 2 min · 241 words · Me