Tanner's Tech

Backing up your Homelab with Veeam

While RAID, ZFS, and other storage technologies do an excellent job of providing redundancy in the case of a drive failure, it is important to remember that redundancy is not a replacement for backups. Instead, it is more of a means to maintain uptime.  Because of this, it is important

Converting a Local Windows Account into an Active Directory Account

Introduction If you're anything like me, you might have a handful of PCs or VMs with local accounts on them from an era prior to you having an Active Directory domain.  Until now, it seemed to me that there was no reasonable way to get the contents of

Monitoring Homelab Services with Uptime Robot

As I've begun hosting more services that close friends and family have found useful, I decided it would be handy for them to be able to easily check on the status of my services at a glance. Uptime Robot has filled that role perfectly, letting me create a

How to Self Host a VPN with PiVPN

Self-hosted VPNs are an extremely helpful tool when it comes to having a homelab. Whether you're at a coffee shop and on public wifi, like I am right now, wanting to securely tunnel back to your own network before accessing a more sensitive site, or even just wanting

Updating an Ubuntu EC2 Instance with Ansible

A while back, I wrote up a post showing how you can easily and automatically update your servers using Ansible.  More recently, I've started to familiarize myself with AWS and have been tinkering with EC2 instances. Having become accustomed to easily updating all of my server with a

Adding Existing Projects to GitHub

This evening, I decided that I'd like to start utilizing source control on some of my projects. I figure that this will have the additional benefit of letting y'all easily view some of my projects and emulate them in your own labs, since I'll

Installing Homer Dashboard with Docker

While I've had a fairly solid understanding of docker for a while now, I've been tinkering with it far more than usual over my extended weekend.  One of the containers I've found to be interesting is Homer, a "dead simple static HOMepage for

Generating and using new SSH keys

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you're wanting to switch out your current sent of public/private SSH keys for a new pair, this guide will run you through the process, step by step. To preface, this process could easily lock you out of servers

How to run any iOS/iPadOS app on your M1 Mac

With the recent transition to the new ARM-based SoC known as the M1, Apple's newest line of Macs are more closely related to their mobile devices than ever.  Unlike previously, users are now able to download (some) iOS apps directly from the App Store. The problem that I

Upgrading Windows Server 2019 Evaluation to Standard

Over the last year or so, I've been running my limited number of Windows Server instances using Windows Server Evaluation, letting me run Windows Server 2019 free for 180 days at a time, with a simple rearm to extend the free license for another 180 days (up to

Creating a Secondary Domain Controller on an Existing Domain

Over the weekend, I was performing some system maintenance which resulted in the ESXi host that houses my domain controller, svr-dc-01, going offline for an unexpectedly long period of time. This ended up causing frustrations on my end due to many of my devices relying upon my internally hosted DNS.

Creating a macOS VM in ESXi

Today's post will cover the simple process of creating a MacOS VM within VMWare ESXi. As you may or may not know, by default, ESXi will not let you run macOS virtual machines. This has to do with Apple's TOS requiring that macOS VMs only be

Enabling the HTML5 iKVM in iDRAC

I don't commonly use the iKVM in iDRAC on my R720xd but when I do, it's typically a pretty unpleasant experience. In the year 2021, nobody should be forced to use a Java application to remotely manage their server. Fortunately, if your iDRAC firmware is on

Creating an Ansible Playbook

Introduction In my previous post, I showed you how to prepare your Linux environment for the use of Ansible and the running of a basic test to ensure its functionality. Today's post will cover how to make use of this new setup with the introduction of Ansible playbooks,

An Introduction to Ansible

While I've been doing the occasional quick write up on new hardware I've obtained or neat tricks I've learned in Linux, it's been quite a while since I've written about new technologies I've been familiarizing myself with. Today,

Transcoding Plex Streams in RAM on Ubuntu Server

You may or may not realize it but transcoding streams in Plex causes a lot of writes to occur on whatever disk the server is running on. If your Plex server is similar to mine, and running on an SSD, this can over time significantly shorten the lifespan of your

A Breakdown of my Hardware Setup

I've done a lot of referencing to some of my hardware in previous blog posts but I wanted to have a dedicated write up over some of the hardware that I'm running, after having a couple of y'all ask for details on my setup

Updating Plex Media Server on Linux

This will be another quick write up but if you're like me, when you see it's time to update your Plex Media Server, you go out and manually download the file, make it executable, and then run it. Today, I found out Plex has a public

Mounting Disks by UUID

In previous posts, I've mentioned a bit about my Plex media server. Up until now, I've just been running two Western Digital drives labeled as /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 in my /etc/fstab. This is generally not a great setup, as using device assignments such

Quieting an R720xd with ipmitool

I mentioned a bit in this post about my R720XD being louder in comparison to my other servers. This has proven to continue, with the fans spinning up easily as high as 60%. With the fans having a peak capacity, even 40% fan speed is LOUD. Luckily, there's

The Newest Addition

I wanted to do a quick lunch break write up over the newest addition to my homelab environment: the Dell R720xd. I chose this model of server for several reasons. The most important of these was that my storage options are fairly limited on my 2xHP ML350ps, especially when looking

Updating Ghost

It's obviously important to keep things up to date for a plethora of reasons so I wanted to do a quick write up on how to update Ghost, a blogging platform that's running the site you're reading now. To start the update process of

How I Made my Blog

The blog post that you are currently reading is hosted on my own infrastructure using Ghost, an open source and free to use blogging platform. If you visit their site, they'll really try to market some paid services, where they host the blog for you but, if you

Upgrading vCenter Appliance from 6.5 to 7.0

With the imminent deprecation of Adobe Flash, I thought this weekend would be a great time for me to look into upgrading my version 6.5 vCenter appliance, since it relies on Flash Player for the full functionality. The process was fairly straightforward but I figured I'd document

Switching from Nouveau to Nvidia Drivers in a Linux Machine

My current Linux workstation doubles as a gaming machine when I choose to boot into Windows and, because of that, has an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super installed in it. While my graphical experience in Linux hasn't been poor while doing day to day internet browsing and such, I