Tiernans Mini Blog

Day 107 of #100daysofhomelab and got some news and updates below:

• Still having issues with Bird 2 and Mikrotik… I seem to have gotten Mikrotik to announce its routes to Bird, but Bird not talking back… More shouting and cursing required…
• Cloudflare have announced Unmetered Rate limiting on their service. Originally, you needed to pay $5 per million requests. Now, you can have 1 rule for free plans, 2 for Pro and 5 for Business.
• They also have a deal with YubiKey where you can get YubiKeys though Cloudflare for as little at $10 per key!
• Still working on fixing all the issues with my main blog before i do a full move to Hugo. Its a bit of a pain cleaning up image links…

Day 106 of #100daysofhomelab and I am still trying to get my VMHaus Box running Bird 2.0. Its running, just not configured right. And some news updates too.

• managed to get Bird 2.0 and Mikrotik talking to each other, but the Mikrotik is announcing only V4 routes to Bird. No V6. And Bird is not announcing ANYTHING to mikrotik…
• upgraded all my Ubuntu and Debian boxes. Need to automate that with Ansible at some stage…
• Video series from Mikrotik about running Docker instances on Router OS.
  • First video shows how to setup containers on your routerboard.
  • Video 2 shows you how to get PiHole working on a routerboard.
• As part of Cloudflare’s Birthday week, they announced a few things of interest for me today. I have signed up for early access to both. We see what the story is
  • Introducing Cloudflare’s free Botnet Threat Feed for service providers
  • Monitor your own network with free network flow analytics from Cloudflare

Day 105 of #100daysofhomelab and I have been working on upgrading from Bird 1.6 to 2.0. Also, some news updates and links.

• Started the process of upgrading my Bird instances from 1.6 to 2.0.
• One box upgraded and partially working. Working on getting it fully functional, then to upgrade the rest.
• Couple of links on upgrading to Bird 2.0:
  • Migrating from bird to bird2 - part 1
  • Migrating from bird to bird2 - part 2
  • Migrating from bird to bird2 - part 3
• Same guy above runs bgpstuff.net
• My AS204994 site is now built with hugo and deployed on Cloudflare Pages. Somewhat “easy” to migrate it from Wordpress… Now to do tiernanotoole.ie next.
• Intel has announced their 13th gen Raptor Lake CPUs and they will be available October 20
• Serve The Home has details of AMDs 7000 series platform
• Serve The Home also has details from Intel Innovation Keynote 2022

Day 104 of #100daysofhomelab and not major going on. Back in $dayjob, so busy catching up with that. Some links, news and updates below:

• Found a VSCode plugin for adding timestamps to files called VSCode InsertDateString. makes adding the time to markdown files easier.
• Cloudflare have announced a new Zero Trust SIM card. This could be very cool! For me, I am thinking a basic data only SIM would work in the tracker in my car (low data usage). A higher data usage option would be the 4G router in the boot/trunk of the car giving Wifi Access to my Dashcam (you can read more about that here). I wonder what would happen with phone calls and text messages though? Is it going to be data only?
• Still looking at the hugo migrations page for moving from Wordpress over to Hugo for the main site…
• And since this is a homelab post, just a note on the whole Proxmox auth with Azure AD: You cant open a terminal when you use that feature… There is probably a setting i am missing, but you will still need to login as root to open a terminal…
• Also, apt-cacher-ng is working very well. Updated all 3 proxmox boxes today. only used about a third of the bandwidth to do updates!

Day 103 of #100daysofhomelab updates:

• my NUC running Proxmox crashed again last night taking down half my AD and DNS infrastructure… again! More digging though the BIOS/UEFI required to try fix it…
• trying to move my AS204994 site from Wordpress over to Hugo.
• Once that is moved, doing the same with my main blog
• They will all be served though Cloudflare Pages
• By moving to Cloudflare Pages and Hugo, I can then get rid of my Cloudflare Workers rewriter!

Day 102 of #100daysofhomelab and still fighting with my Cloudflare Workers stuff.

• I though i had added caching to it, but it looks like i broke something. Its writing the result to cache, but not able to read it properly…
• on the more homelab side of things, just gone though some boxes and checked their update status.
• want to move all my old docker stuff from my docker vm, aptly named docker to my new new-docker box. or even build a third one. Ideally, chance the names to docker-01 and docker-02.
• Still wanting to move GodBoxV3 from Windows Server 2022 over to ProxMox. It currently has 2x20 Core Xeon Gold processors, 256GB RAM, 2x512GB NVMe drives in RAID for boot, 5 more 512Gb NVMe’s in RAID for fast storage, 8x8TB HDDs for bulk storage and 2x960GB SSDs for other storage… It also has a Quadro P2000 Graphics card in there.
• If i get it moved to ProxMox, i could set up TrueNAS as a VM with most of the disks, plus then build a Plex Server with the P2000. More work required.

Day 101 of #100daysofhomelab is mostly more work on my Cloudflare Workers stuff…

• Trying to adapt the edge cache html worker from Cloudflare to work with my Cloudinary Re Writer.
• looking into building an app for automatically uploading images to Cloudinary based on what is in a markdown file, and then rewrite the URL to use said URL…
• Actual home lab stuff is checking for updates. I am finished my holidays now, so i should be back mostly in the homelab, so more actual homelab stuff coming in the next few days.

I finally made it! day 100 of #100daysofhomelab and a post about what I have done in that 100 Days!

Some Tweet Stats. I got the info from Vicinitas and exported my last 3200 tweets to Excel. Filter based on the tweet including the #100daysofhomelab hashtag and here are some numbers:

• first, It looks like i have posted 210 Tweets to the #100daysofhomelab hashtag (excluding this one…).
• first post was on 12 June about getting the FTTH ground works installed.
• My most liked tweet was about IPv6 fixing my issue with Proxmox Backups in Hetzner.

Now, things i have learned and worked on in those 100 days:

• Proxmox installed on first box in the house. Now have it running on 3 in total in a cluster!
• FTTH installed and running withMikrotik Acting as PPPoE endpoint.
• got wireguard running on Mikrotik between the house and my upstream servers
• DNS Control and Github actions post
• got IPv6 working on my homelab using UDM Pro!
• good bit of messing with HomeAssistant
• Broke the WIFI on my network by not fully reading the docs…
• Became number 3 in the top 25 ISPs in Ireland supporting IPv6!!. I have since dropped to 5, but i also seem to be the fastest on that page (at the bottom!)
• Moved my 3CX instance over to Proxmox.
• Acciently spun up a K8s cluster then it started activing up so i killed it… Still dead… one of these days I’ll get it back up and running…
• Got Pipedream and Mikrotik talking to each other for alerts
• Ran Sophos XG on the homelab for a bit, but ended up back with OpnSense.
• Got AD running in house and syncing (kind of) with Azure AD
• Got Proxmox authenticating with Azure AD
• Playing with Cloudflare Workers.

So, its been a busy few months! I am going to continue using the miniblog as a homelab blog, but will have some stuff up on the main blog or the Cloudshed blog. Not sure if i should still be using #100daysofhomelab. I have seen some tweets for day 101 and 102… So, maybe it will continue! We will see!

In the words of Vinny Jones:

Day 99 of #100daysofhomelab… and i’m still trying to get Azure AD Sync working… But i did get comments on my blog!

• I have an on-prem AD which is brand new, and an Azure AD which has been in production since 2012… I have an on prem user and a main Azure AD user, but getting them to sync is not working… Ugh… I keep getting an AttributeValueMustBeUnique Error… I also seem to be getting permission-issue errors… I AM THE ADMINISTRATOR! WTF?!
• Microsoft now have Systemd support in WSL.
• Plex Pro week, 2022 started a few days ago with a video from Linus Tech Tips. Some other interesting articles on their blog here.
• I am still battling with my Cloudflare Workers Rewrite thing, but I am thinking of moving from Wordpress back to Hugo. I can then add the photo work as part of the Hugo build…
• Finally, I added comments using utteranc.es to this site. You need a Github account to comment, but try it out!

Tomorrow is day 100 of #100daysofhomelab, and I am planning a retrospective of what I have done over the last 100 days!

Day 98 of #100daysofhomelab and ive been working on Cloudflare Workers stuff and trying to fix my Azure AD Sync.

• I use Wordpress on my main blog and the AS204994 site with the Cloudinary Plugin for images. I am trying to rewrite the URLs to use a different domain for image hosting. It will do caching of images, saving bandwidth on Cloudinary and hopefully making things faster… So far, not working as planned, but getting closer…
• I have some (very minor, mostly caching and logging edits) edits to the original Cloudflare Workers code for the Cloudinary Proxy from wesbos.
• looks like my Azure AD Sync failed at some stage, so digging though that to fix it.
• Also, seems something on the network is acting up… I think this might be appropriate…