Ceph

I’ve been building a lot of virtual machines and containers on Proxmox lately. To save some time I wrote an Ansible role to provision Proxmox containers for me, I just have to update some variables. The role is available here: https://github.com/engonzal/ansible_role_proxmox Proxmox Variables Below is a basic set of variables, note that the pve_apiuser, pve_apipass and pve_api_host are required. pve_node: pve1 pve_apiuser: root@pam pve_apipass: myAPIpassword pve_api_host: pve1.domain.com pve_hostname: "newhostname" pve_template: local:vztmpl/debian-9.0-standard_9.5-1_amd64.tar.gz pve_netif: net0: "name=eth0,gw=192.168.84.1,ip=192.168.84.36/22,bridge=vmbr0" Proxmox Test Playbook Now we’re going to put those variables in a playbook that will actually do something. If you haven’t setup Ansible before, read about how to set it up with virtualenv. ...

There’s a lot of potential apps to host in a homelab. I’ve started investigating which ones to deploy first! Also some info on getting Ceph and Proxmox up and running at home. I was hitting all kind of ceph “OSD” delays when working on things in my Proxmox cluster. Stumbled upon this gem pointing out that the Proxmox kernel has old Solarflare drivers that may affect Ceph performance. No delays since! With the storage working, I decided to start bind mounting my CephFS mounts in Proxmox LXC containers. Some useful dotfile for setting up a fresh Linux install. Askbot is an open source take of StackOverflow that you can host at home. Polr is a neat looking link shortener. Cachet is an open source status page you can self-host. Plex added support for Tidal, an interesting merging of home and cloud media streaming. Ceph has “S3” support via their RadosGW. Next Ceph project will be to configure that, and see how performance works with “Goofys” as a file-system on S3. Hashicorp Vault is on my to-do list, came across some videos from Hashiconf. Some performance testing of different Kubernetes plugins running on hosts with 10G network interfaces.

I’ve been pretty deep into Ceph. I’m rebuilding my multimedia setup. I was hoping to use Ceph for persistent storage in docker containers, but had some issues doing that. Ended up mounting a share with cephfs and sharing it out via NFS. Not pretty but it’s working! Another post from Michael Dehaan discussing the differences between Ansible and his new tool “OpsMop”. Some pretty interesting discussion early goals for Ansible and how he’s trying to do them better with OpsMop. Just snagged a $5 year of Shodan, then internet scanning tool. Pretty excited to play with it in a new python project. This article covers some basic usage of Shodan. I relied on this cephfs guide from JamesCoyle pretty heavily while fooling around with Ceph storage this week. Google is offering private Git repositories. While I’ll probably move my local Gitea instance to a VPS server, it’s nice to have options for private repos. I listen to the Beers with Talos podcast pretty often, it’s usually pretty interesting to hear some of the cyber security stories they have. This post from FireEye discussed a phising campaign that hit Government/military/defense targets. The “Container Operators Manual” is probably the reallest container talk I’ve ever watched. Alice hit’s all the major pain points that organizations hit when migrating to containers. I found myself saying “Yeah we had this problem! Yes that was so annoying!” Anna Simoroshka has some great advice for working on side projects and managing time. I forgot how hard it is to work on side projects during the winter/holidays. It was refreshing to read some of these tips and remind myself to prioritize project work. Music recommendations for coding (or homelabbing in my case). My Ceph storage setup has a few OSDs (disks) that are slow, and I notice it while working on my VMs. I’m probably gonna have to look into creating a pool with only SSD storage. It’ll be interesting figuring out how to define that in the crush map. Have a great week!