There’s a highly efficient monitoring system in my house, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Grafana. It tracks electricity costs with a level of accuracy I’ve never managed to achieve in my own infrastructure, generates alerts that are nearly impossible to ignore, and has a remarkable ability to win every discussion. As it […]
How I Automated My Home Lab Power Schedule — And Made the Alerts Stop Read Post »
Everyone is migrating from VMware to Proxmox. Blog posts, Reddit threads, YouTube tutorials — the internet is flooded with guides on escaping VMware licensing costs and embracing the open-source promised land. It’s practically a movement. And then there’s me, going the other way. While the rest of the world is celebrating their freedom from vCenter,
Swimming Upstream: Exporting VMs from Proxmox to ESXi/vCenter Read Post »
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 »