Devops

When you install TrueNAS SCALE your NAS runs a Netdata. You can verify that by executing systemctl status netdata in the TrueNAS shell. I use Netdata to monitor my homelab and have a parent set up for long term metric storage. I’d love to configure the NAS to also push metrics to a parent, so that I can access them all from a single place. Normally, if you want to set up streaming in Netdata it’s enough to edit /etc/netdata/stream.conf. However, I wouldn’t recommend doing this on a TrueNAS install for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this is not a recommended way of adjusting configuration and that is clearly evident when you open up the TrueNAS shell: ...

I’ve written in the past that this blog is a playground for me to try various tools and play with code around it. Jenkins has been my choice as the CI for it since the start, mostly since it was something I’m used to. However, I’ve also stated that running it on an old laptop with no real backups is a recipe for disaster. I have since rectified the issue by hiding the laptop under a box in a closet but that meant moving away from Jenkins to something that’s lighter and more portable. The choice is the self-hosted enterprise edition of Drone. ...

I’ve recently had my birthday and as a gift decided to give myself a NUC. The intention here is that I could replace the old laptop running Jenkins and Grafana with something that’s a bit more silent and in a smaller form factor. Note that I’m not affiliated with any of the hardware manufacturers in any way shape or form. The planned change The laptop I’ve been using for Jenkins has become rather critical for this blog and a few side projects I’ve got. This meant that I first needed to find a way to migrate everything to a new machine that would be coming. I’ve then focused on rewriting my infra to code with the help of Ansible®. Even though I’m not a super big fan of it I’ve managed to write everything as an Ansible playbook. I did, however, skip the Jenkins and moved towards Drone CI instead. With this complete, I needed to figure out what type of a machine I might want to go for. ...

I’ve written about the infrastructure behind this blog in a previous post and the major issue with it currently is the old laptop I have at home that’s running the Jenkins instance. I really have no way of backing it all up. I’ve asked around a bit and the reddit thread I’ve made pointed me towards moving it all towards Ansible. Since people are using Ansible at work I thought it would be appropriate for me to try it as well. ...

There are quite a few components to this blog now. There’s an AWS S3 bucket the blog gets served from, there’s a backend service responsible for the mouthful comments, there’s another instance of the service for the mouthful demo page, with another S3 bucket to serve the page for it. There’s also a yet unused service living in the same “cluster” as these two(It’ll get added to this blog soon™). There’s quite a few private github repositories that in unison with a Jenkins instance make this all work. Oh, and everything is running under Docker, with ECS handling all the orchestration for that. For the data stores, I use dynamodb, mysql and sqlite. There’s also some miscellaneous bits and bobs, like the grafana instance that plots response times and uptimes of the APIs. I’ve tried to keep as much as I can inside AWS but due to cost constraints I had to do some workarounds. So how does it all work then? ...

So I’ve had this raspberry pi 3 laying around in my closet for a year or a bit more now. While I thought I’d use it for automating something such as monitoring our plants for changes in soil moisture that did not come to fruition. With the start of this blog and the increase in tooling around it, I really needed something to run any sort of CI platform. I tend to host everything under AWS so that everything is under one roof. Issue there is that it might become rather expensive if you start spinning many instances. And CI is something that you might not want to run on the same machine as your services. So I thoguht to myself maybe I can get my jenkins on ec2-nano? That would probably set me back 5$ a month. Then a cheaper option came to mind - why not use the RPI3 for my Jenkins? ...

I was looking for a way to add commenting functionality to the blog. The obvious candidate was Disqus but I did not choose it for 2 reasons: It’s too heavy(at around 200KB) It contains ads The weight itself would kill my quest for page speed instantly.So I set up to find a way to provide commenting ability on the blog. I knew this would probably lead me to a self-hosted solution but that did not scare me. Requirements were quite simple: ...