Replacing a boot disk in the ZFS pool of your Proxmox installation
When I expanded my homelab I bought two mini PCs. One Dell DeskMini and a Lenovo ThinkCenter. While the 16GB of RAM and 512GB NVMe SSD of the Lenovo are enough for many homelab needs, I wanted to expand both to match the Dells 32GB/1TB. Especially since I have two 16GB sticks of SO-DIMM memory and a 1TB SSD from my old laptop just laying around collecting dust. Expanding the memory is easy, just open the bottom access hatch of the ThinkCenter take out the old RAM and install the new one....
Using an Intel GPU for Jellyfin Hardware Acceleration
I recently expanded my homelab with a Mini PC which has a i7-8700T CPU with an integrated GPU. Using a GPU to offload transcoding from the CPU can massively increase the transcoding performance while reducing CPU load. This means a faster Jellyfin Server and more CPU time for other tasks. However, using a GPU in a Virtual Machine (VM) is not always straight forward. Luckily, in Proxmox it is just a few commands away....
Deploying the UniFi SDN Controller on Kubernetes
The Ubiquity UniFi line of network devices has long been a top choice among small businesses and networking enthusiasts for their WiFi access points, switches, and more. One of the key aspects of managing these devices is the requirement for a controller, which can be installed on a separate device or self-hosted. In this blog post, I鈥檒l guide you through the process of hosting your Ubiquiti UniFi controller in a Kubernetes cluster while utilizing Ingress Nginx to make it accessible over the internet....
Enrolling an Unprivileged Proxmox Container in a FreeIPA Domain
LXC containers provide an easy way to run applications on Proxmox with very little overhead compared to virtual machines. Unprivileged containers provide greater security compared to privileged containers. Usage of privileged containers is highly discouraged in the Proxmox documentation. However if you want to enroll LXC containers in a domain managed with FreeIPA, this will not work with unprivileged containers out of the box. Why Enrolling an Unprivileged Container is not Possible An unprivileged LXC container cannot be enrolled, due to the very high UID and GUID numbers used by FreeIPA....
Retrospect: Managing a Kubernetes Cluster with Ansible
When I first started using Kubernetes it felt only natural to use the same tool to manage it which I (tried) to use for everything else: Ansible. And that鈥檚 how I started using Ansible playbooks to manage Kubernetes by applying manifests directly or installing Helm charts. In this post I want to elaborate how I used Ansible for this task, what was good about it and what was not and finally, why I switched to a different tool now....