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 »
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 »
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 Part 3: Analyzing Packet Loss with Wireshark ← You are here Part 4: UDP Loss from Link Flapping and Network Instability Part 5: Inter-VLAN
ESXi Packet Loss Troubleshooting with iPerf3 & pktcap-uw – Part 3 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 »
This article is part of the 5-part series: “ESXi Packet Loss Troubleshooting with iPerf3 and pktcap-uw” Part 1: Baseline Testing and Setup ← You are here 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
ESXi Packet Loss Troubleshooting with iPerf3 & pktcap-uw – Part 1 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 »
Dell’s Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) is an essential tool for managing Dell PowerEdge servers remotely. However, losing access due to a forgotten password can be a challenge. If you have ESXi installed on your server, you can reset the iDRAC password directly from the ESXi shell using the RACADM tool. This guide walks
Resetting Dell iDRAC Password from Within ESXi Read Post »