I used to have a very simple monitoring strategy for my home lab: if the fans were spinning and the LEDs were blinking, everything was fine. If the room was quiet, I had a problem. While that approach has a certain rustic charm, it is terrible for uptime and even worse for troubleshooting. You can’t […]
Building a Scalable Monitoring Stack with Prometheus & Grafana Read Post »
If you’ve ever deployed a VM in vSphere and caught yourself thinking, “There must be a faster way to do this,” you’re definitely not alone. After clicking through the same wizard more times than I’d like to admit, I decided it was time to build something cleaner, smarter, and fully automated. In this series, I’ll
In the first two parts of this series, I focused on building the foundation of a smart holiday home hub. In Part 1, I set up the hardware and base software stack: a Raspberry Pi 5 running Docker, Home Assistant, and Node-RED, designed to be compact, power-efficient, and easy to maintain remotely. Part 2 expanded
The Autonomous Holiday Home (Part 3): Self-Healing Power and Dual-WAN Failover Read Post »
In the previous post, we built the foundation of our automation system — Docker running on the Raspberry Pi, with Home Assistant, Node-RED, and Mosquitto working together.Everything is now alive and connected, but so far… it’s just a system waiting for data. Time to change that. At the vacation house, I already use a few
The Autonomous Holiday Home (Part 2): Connectivity and Sensor Monitoring with MQTT Read Post »
When managing virtual machines in VMware vSphere, it’s common to run out of disk space over time. Fortunately, expanding a virtual disk is straightforward, but it involves both changes in vSphere and inside the guest operating system. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the steps to increase the disk size of an Ubuntu Linux
How to Increase Disk Size of an Ubuntu Linux VM in vSphere Read Post »
This article is part of the 5-part series: “ESXi Packet Loss Troubleshooting with iPerf3 and pktcap-uw” Part 1: Baseline Testing and Setup Part 2: Capturing UDP Traffic Under Different CPU Loads Part 3: Analyzing Packet Loss with Wireshark Part 4: UDP Loss from Link Flapping and Network Instability Part 5: Inter-VLAN UDP Loss Caused by
ESXi Packet Loss Troubleshooting with iPerf3 & pktcap-uw – Part 5 Read Post »
This article is part of the 5-part series: “ESXi Packet Loss Troubleshooting with iPerf3 and pktcap-uw” Part 1: Baseline Testing and Setup Part 2: Capturing UDP Traffic Under Different CPU Loads Part 3: Analyzing Packet Loss with Wireshark Part 4: UDP Loss from Link Flapping and Network Instability ← You are here Part 5: Inter-VLAN
ESXi Packet Loss Troubleshooting with iPerf3 & pktcap-uw – Part 4 Read Post »
This article is part of the 5-part series: “ESXi Packet Loss Troubleshooting with iPerf3 and pktcap-uw” Part 1: Baseline Testing and Setup Part 2: Capturing UDP Traffic Under Different CPU Loads ← You are here Part 3: Analyzing Packet Loss with Wireshark Part 4: UDP Loss from Link Flapping and Network Instability Part 5: Inter-VLAN
ESXi Packet Loss Troubleshooting with iPerf3 & pktcap-uw – Part 2 Read Post »
Let’s be honest — keeping a fleet of Ubuntu servers updated isn’t the most glamorous job, especially when they’re tucked away behind firewalls with no internet access. But what if we could turn this dusty chore into a clean, elegant, and even satisfying little automation adventure? That’s exactly what we did. This was actually my
Secure and Centralized Ubuntu Patching with Ansible Read Post »
Managing server hardware remotely is essential in modern IT environments. HPE’s Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) provides remote management capabilities for HPE ProLiant servers. One of the tools to configure and manage iLO is HPONCFG. This utility allows administrators to configure iLO settings without having to reboot the server or restart services, making it a powerful tool
Using HPONCFG to Manage iLO Settings on HPE Servers in Windows and Linux Read Post »