New Blog, same address As part of my new Rancher Cattle Swarm that I have finally gotten semi-stable across my arm devices, I have also recently discovered Caddy, and Hugo. This seemed like an excellent, lightweight alternative to Wordpress and running a MariaDB backend. I also previously was running a small nginx web server just for my primary website. Well, I decided that, instead, running a simple Caddy webserver with a virtual host for each of my websites would suffice, and I could use Hugo to replace the bulky Wordpress. Of course, I don’t have a github account, and don’t particularly want one, but I needed at least some way to automate adding new posts which Hugo doesn’t currently do.

Welcome Back!

Update

This information doesn’t work on the new 1.1.0+ Agents. You will need to checkout 1.0.2 if you want to use this.

Last time I was trying to get my Odroid’s, and Raspberry Pi’s working as a Docker Swarm built on the newly integrated tools baked into Docker 1.12. That wasn’t working quite right as I explained in that post, primarily with the overlay network. The Odroid’s couldn’t quite route traffic right between all the hosts. So, I once again attempted Kubernetes, and ended up running into the exact same problems as before. Primarily, though I could get it installed and deploy containers among all the boxes, the DNS would cease to function after a reboot and it doesn’t survive a reboot of the Master node very well. I do like the interface for Kubernetes, but it really needs to make Multi-Master configurations easier to setup, and I don’t like how many changes to the underlying host OS it requires to run properly.

Welcome Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time working on my recently built swarm consisting of two Odroid-C1’s, an Odroid-XU4, and a NanoPC-T1. I was using Shipyard as a management interface and everything worked OK, but it didn’t have any automated failover or high-availability solution. If one of the devices went down, the containers running on that device would die and wait for the device to come back up to restart. You could scale the containers, but that doesn’t work for all servers (like IRC and Murmur). I wanted to tinker and see if I could get around that limitation.

Welcome back, mainly to me, hah.

It’s been almost two years since my last post, but I have made sure to keep the blog running in case the information on it proves useful to people. I have even used it to recall a few old scripts here and there, so I’ll be sure to keep it around. I still have the problem of not wanting to document things as I finish them, which is terrible when you want to run a blog, but we can play a little catch up here.

In the past two years, here’s the projects I can recall dealing with:

Hello, and welcome. In the last couple firewall articles I went through and explained the differences in some popular distributions. Ultimately, I stuck with pfSense for quite a long time, and it has come a long ways since I did my original review having made many things easier in both interface and installation. Recently, I bought into the idea of getting an account from an “anonymous”/no-log VPN service to help maintain a little extra “anonymity” on the internet. As always, pfSense is amazing in that it was one of the firewalls specifically listed from my provider with steps on how to support it.

Hello interwebz, My movie viewing experience has gone through several stages over the years and just recently I got a setup that I’m thoroughly enjoying more than any previous solution. First, a few years ago I made a post that mentioned using the PS3 with Ps3MediaServer (PMS). That worked for some time, but I like digital copies of my media and when Cinavia became a big thing, and the fact I only use free ripping software and not the pay windows software that were “Cinavia compatible”, it killed my new movies. So from there I went to a local Best Buy and got an older WD TV Live Plus and put the B-Rad modified firmware on it.

Yes, in fact, I am.

The past couple years have actually been quite busy for me. Just not, unfortunately, in a technical/geek way. I started this blog because I tend to be the kind of guy that gets a fun idea for a computer or techie item and tries it out just because.

I like to mess with different linux distributions, install weird software, randomly change out my dedicated firewalls for our home, etc. I figured that if I documented some of these things that are never quite as easy as advertised, it might help out some other people.

Nasty Borders!

Hey all, welcome back.

Recently I picked myself up a PS3 (Ok, so I bought it for the “kid” for “christmas” ;)), and wanted to serve my video files to my 42″ HDTV. Now, I think there are three kinds of people when it comes to watching videos on these HDTV’s. You’ve got those that want a film to be stretched to fit width-wise, maintaining it’s aspect ratio, and just adding the black borders to the top and bottom as filler. This preserves the “look” of the video so that nothing is misproportioned. Then you have those, like me, that don’t mind if people get a little taller and skinnier, but just can’t stand having half the screen be wasted black space. The third is those that don’t care. There’s always a group for those that don’t care :D.

Hello World!

It’s been a few months since my last post.. I’ve definitely let my blog go by the wayside.  It just seems I’ve been running out of things to tinker with.  But, when I do get around to doing something that I can’t find much information on while googling I try and document it somewhere.

Hello World!

Update: Everything in this post is outdated.  pyPianobar is discontinued, and the Feral Druid’s rotation is both wrong, and no longer maintained.

I know I’ve been missing lately; I have gotten myself pretty busy between WoW, setting up an HA/LB (High Availability/Load Balancing) web and database server(s) for a client and just time with the family.

If you haven’t seen it before, Ultra Monkey is quite a simple and nice set of tools to manage an HA/LB configuration – and it has several good example configurations to get you started.