diff --git a/blog/2021/09/06/what-to-do-with-a-homelab/index.html b/blog/2021/09/06/what-to-do-with-a-homelab/index.html
index 002ae3b4..66ded94c 100644
--- a/blog/2021/09/06/what-to-do-with-a-homelab/index.html
+++ b/blog/2021/09/06/what-to-do-with-a-homelab/index.html
@@ -123,7 +123,7 @@ tech blog
-3 mins read
+4 mins read
@@ -137,9 +137,10 @@ Building a homelab can be an entertaining playground to enhance your computer sk
One of the simplest ways to build a homelab is out of a refurbished computer.
Having multiple machines/nodes provides the advantage of increased redundancy, but starting out with a single node is enough to reap many of the benefits of having a homelab.
Virtualization
-
Virtualizing your hardware is an organized way of dividing up your machine’s resources. This can be done with something such as a Virtual Machine or something lighter like a container using LXC or runC.
Containers have much less overhead in terms of boot time and storage allocation. This Stack Overflow answer sums it up nicely.
+
+
A hypervisor such as Proxmox can be installed in minutes on a new machine. It provides a web interface a straight-forward way to spin up new VMs and containers. You’ll want to ensure that VT-d and VT-X are enabled in the BIOS if you decide to install a hypervisor to manage your virtualization.
Services
So what are some useful services to deploy?
diff --git a/page/search/index.json b/page/search/index.json
index 1c08dd84..4fe6c180 100644
--- a/page/search/index.json
+++ b/page/search/index.json
@@ -1 +1 @@
-[{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m a software engineer with a passion for open-source, infrastructure, tooling and security.\nWhen I\u0026rsquo;m not in front of a computer, I enjoy traveling, hiking and spending time with my family.\n","href":"/about/","title":"About"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/adguard/","title":"adguard"},{"content":"","href":"/","title":"davegallant"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/homelab/","title":"homelab"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/linux/","title":"linux"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/netdata/","title":"netdata"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/pihole/","title":"pihole"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/plex/","title":"plex"},{"content":"","href":"/post/","title":"Posts"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/","title":"Tags"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/tailscale/","title":"tailscale"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/virtualization/","title":"virtualization"},{"content":"A homelab can be an inexpensive way to host a multitude of internal/external services and learn a lot in the process.\nDo you want host your own Media server? Ad blocker? Web server? Are you interested in learning more about Linux? Virtualization? Networking? Security? Building a homelab can be an entertaining playground to enhance your computer skills.\nOne of the best parts about building a homelab is that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to be a large investment in terms hardware.\nOne of the simplest ways to build a homelab is out of a refurbished computer. Having multiple machines/nodes provides the advantage of increased redundancy, but starting out with a single node is enough to reap many of the benefits of having a homelab.\nVirtualization Virtualizing your hardware is an organized way of dividing up your machine\u0026rsquo;s resources. This can be done with something such as a Virtual Machine or something lighter like a container using LXC or runC. Containers have much less overhead in terms of boot time and storage allocation. This Stack Overflow answer sums it up nicely.\nServices So what are some useful services to deploy?\n Plex - basically a self-hosted Netflix that can be used to stream from multiple devices, and the best part is that you manage the content! changedetection - is a self-hosted equivalent to something like visualping.io that will notify you when a webpage changes and keep track of the diffs Adguard or Pihole - can block a list of known trackers for all clients on your local network. I\u0026rsquo;ve used pihole for a long time, but have recently switched to Adguard since the UI is more modern and it has the ability to toggle on/off a pre-defined list of services, including Netflix (this is useful if you have stealthy young kids). Either of these will speed up your internet experience, simply because you won\u0026rsquo;t need to download all of the extra tracking bloat. There is a large number of services you can self-host, including your own applications that you might be developing. awesome-self-hosted provides a curated list of services that might be of interest to you.\nVPN You could certainly setup and manage your own VPN by using something like OpenVPN, but there is also something else you can try: tailscale. It is a very quick way to create fully-encrypted connections between clients. And by using its MagicDNS, it is a truly magical solution. If one of your nodes has a hostname of plex, you can simply access it by referring to its hostname (i.e ssh plex@plex). This way you can create a secure tunnel to your homelab from anywhere in the world!\nMonitoring Monitoring can become an important aspect of your homelab after it starts to become something that is relied upon. One of the simplest ways to setup some monitoring is using netdata. It can be installed on individual containers, VMs, and also a hypervisor (such as Proxmox). All of the monitoring works out of the box by detecting disks, memory, network interfaces, etc.\nAdditionally, all of these different agents can be connected to netdata cloud, which can alert you when some of your infrastructure is down or in a degraded state. Adding additional nodes to netdata cloud is as simple as a 1 line shell command.\nGrafana is another popular way of visualizing metrics, although it requires more initial setup.\nIn Summary Building out a homelab can be incredibly rewarding and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t always require buying a rack full of expensive servers to get a significant amount of utility.\n","href":"/blog/2021/09/06/what-to-do-with-a-homelab/","title":"What To Do With A Homelab"},{"content":"AppGate SDP provides a Zero Trust network. This post describes how to get AppGate SDP 4.3.2 working on Arch Linux.\nDepending on the AppGate SDP Server that is running, you may require a client that is more recent than the latest package on AUR. As of right now, the latest AUR is 4.2.2-1.\nThese steps highlight how to get it working with Python3.8 by making a 1 line modification to AppGate source code.\nPackaging We already know the community package is currently out of date, so let\u0026rsquo;s clone it:\ngit clone https://aur.archlinux.org/appgate-sdp.git cd appgate-sdp You\u0026rsquo;ll likely notice that the version is not what we want, so let\u0026rsquo;s modify the PKGBUILD to the following:\n# Maintainer: Pawel Mosakowski \u0026lt;pawel at mosakowski dot net\u0026gt; pkgname=appgate-sdp conflicts=(\u0026#39;appgate-sdp-headless\u0026#39;) pkgver=4.3.2 _download_pkgver=4.3 pkgrel=1 epoch= pkgdesc=\u0026#34;Software Defined Perimeter - GUI client\u0026#34; arch=(\u0026#39;x86_64\u0026#39;) url=\u0026#34;https://www.cyxtera.com/essential-defense/appgate-sdp/support\u0026#34; license=(\u0026#39;custom\u0026#39;) # dependecies calculated by namcap depends=(\u0026#39;gconf\u0026#39; \u0026#39;libsecret\u0026#39; \u0026#39;gtk3\u0026#39; \u0026#39;python\u0026#39; \u0026#39;nss\u0026#39; \u0026#39;libxss\u0026#39; \u0026#39;nodejs\u0026#39; \u0026#39;dnsmasq\u0026#39;) source=(\u0026#34;https://sdpdownloads.cyxtera.com/AppGate-SDP-${_download_pkgver}/clients/${pkgname}_${pkgver}_amd64.deb\u0026#34; \u0026#34;appgatedriver.service\u0026#34;) options=(staticlibs) prepare() { tar -xf data.tar.xz } package() { cp -dpr \u0026#34;${srcdir}\u0026#34;/{etc,lib,opt,usr} \u0026#34;${pkgdir}\u0026#34; mv -v \u0026#34;$pkgdir/lib/systemd/system\u0026#34; \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/lib/systemd/\u0026#34; rm -vrf \u0026#34;$pkgdir/lib\u0026#34; cp -v \u0026#34;$srcdir/appgatedriver.service\u0026#34; \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/lib/systemd/system/appgatedriver.service\u0026#34; mkdir -vp \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/licenses/appgate-sdp\u0026#34; cp -v \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/appgate/copyright\u0026#34; \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/licenses/appgate-sdp\u0026#34; cp -v \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/appgate/LICENSE.github\u0026#34; \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/licenses/appgate-sdp\u0026#34; cp -v \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/appgate/LICENSES.chromium.html.bz2\u0026#34; \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/licenses/appgate-sdp\u0026#34; } md5sums=(\u0026#39;17101aac7623c06d5fbb95f50cf3dbdc\u0026#39; \u0026#39;002644116e20b2d79fdb36b7677ab4cf\u0026#39;) Let\u0026rsquo;s first make sure we have some dependencies. If you do not have yay, check it out.\nyay -S dnsmasq gconf Now, let\u0026rsquo;s install it:\nmakepkg -si Running the client Ok, let\u0026rsquo;s run the client by executing appgate.\nIt complains about not being able to connect.\nEasy fix:\nsudo systemctl start appgatedriver.service Now we should be connected\u0026hellip; but DNS is not working?\nFixing the DNS Running resolvectl should display that something is not right.\nWhy is the DNS not being set by appgate?\n$ head -3 /opt/appgate/linux/set_dns #!/usr/bin/env python3 \u0026#39;\u0026#39;\u0026#39; This is used to set and unset the DNS. It seems like python3 is required for the DNS setting to happen. Let\u0026rsquo;s try to run it.\n$ sudo /opt/appgate/linux/set_dns /opt/appgate/linux/set_dns:88: SyntaxWarning: \u0026#34;is\u0026#34; with a literal. Did you mean \u0026#34;==\u0026#34;? servers = [( socket.AF_INET if x.version is 4 else socket.AF_INET6, map(int, x.packed)) for x in servers] Traceback (most recent call last): File \u0026#34;/opt/appgate/linux/set_dns\u0026#34;, line 30, in \u0026lt;module\u0026gt; import dbus ModuleNotFoundError: No module named \u0026#39;dbus\u0026#39; Ok, let\u0026rsquo;s install it:\n$ sudo python3.8 -m pip install dbus-python Will it work now? Not yet. There\u0026rsquo;s another issue:\n$ sudo /opt/appgate/linux/set_dns /opt/appgate/linux/set_dns:88: SyntaxWarning: \u0026#34;is\u0026#34; with a literal. Did you mean \u0026#34;==\u0026#34;? servers = [( socket.AF_INET if x.version is 4 else socket.AF_INET6, map(int, x.packed)) for x in servers] module \u0026#39;platform\u0026#39; has no attribute \u0026#39;linux_distribution\u0026#39; This is a breaking change in Python3.8.\nSo what is calling platform.linux_distribution?\nLet\u0026rsquo;s search for it:\n$ sudo grep -r \u0026#39;linux_distribution\u0026#39; /opt/appgate/linux/ /opt/appgate/linux/nm.py: if platform.linux_distribution()[0] != \u0026#39;Fedora\u0026#39;: Aha! So this is in the local AppGate source code. This should be an easy fix. Let\u0026rsquo;s just replace this line with:\nif True: # Since we are not using Fedora :) Wrapping up It turns out there are breaking changes in Python3.8.\nThe docs say Deprecated since version 3.5, will be removed in version 3.8: See alternative like the distro package.\nI suppose this highlights one of the caveats of relying upon the system\u0026rsquo;s python, rather than having an isolated, dedicated environment for all dependencies.\n","href":"/blog/2020/03/16/appgate-sdp-on-arch-linux/","title":"AppGate SDP on Arch Linux"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/python/","title":"python"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/vpn/","title":"vpn"},{"content":"test\n","href":"/page/search/","title":""},{"content":"","href":"/authors/","title":"Authors"},{"content":"","href":"/page/","title":"Pages"}]
\ No newline at end of file
+[{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m a software engineer with a passion for open-source, infrastructure, tooling and security.\nWhen I\u0026rsquo;m not in front of a computer, I enjoy traveling, hiking and spending time with my family.\n","href":"/about/","title":"About"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/adguard/","title":"adguard"},{"content":"","href":"/","title":"davegallant"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/homelab/","title":"homelab"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/linux/","title":"linux"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/netdata/","title":"netdata"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/pihole/","title":"pihole"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/plex/","title":"plex"},{"content":"","href":"/post/","title":"Posts"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/","title":"Tags"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/tailscale/","title":"tailscale"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/virtualization/","title":"virtualization"},{"content":"A homelab can be an inexpensive way to host a multitude of internal/external services and learn a lot in the process.\nDo you want host your own Media server? Ad blocker? Web server? Are you interested in learning more about Linux? Virtualization? Networking? Security? Building a homelab can be an entertaining playground to enhance your computer skills.\nOne of the best parts about building a homelab is that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to be a large investment in terms hardware.\nOne of the simplest ways to build a homelab is out of a refurbished computer. Having multiple machines/nodes provides the advantage of increased redundancy, but starting out with a single node is enough to reap many of the benefits of having a homelab.\nVirtualization Virtualizing your hardware is an organized way of dividing up your machine\u0026rsquo;s resources. This can be done with something such as a Virtual Machine or something lighter like a container using LXC or runC. Containers have much less overhead in terms of boot time and storage allocation. This Stack Overflow answer sums it up nicely.\nA hypervisor such as Proxmox can be installed in minutes on a new machine. It provides a web interface a straight-forward way to spin up new VMs and containers. You\u0026rsquo;ll want to ensure that VT-d and VT-X are enabled in the BIOS if you decide to install a hypervisor to manage your virtualization.\nServices So what are some useful services to deploy?\n Plex - basically a self-hosted Netflix that can be used to stream from multiple devices, and the best part is that you manage the content! changedetection - is a self-hosted equivalent to something like visualping.io that will notify you when a webpage changes and keep track of the diffs Adguard or Pihole - can block a list of known trackers for all clients on your local network. I\u0026rsquo;ve used pihole for a long time, but have recently switched to Adguard since the UI is more modern and it has the ability to toggle on/off a pre-defined list of services, including Netflix (this is useful if you have stealthy young kids). Either of these will speed up your internet experience, simply because you won\u0026rsquo;t need to download all of the extra tracking bloat. There is a large number of services you can self-host, including your own applications that you might be developing. awesome-self-hosted provides a curated list of services that might be of interest to you.\nVPN You could certainly setup and manage your own VPN by using something like OpenVPN, but there is also something else you can try: tailscale. It is a very quick way to create fully-encrypted connections between clients. And by using its MagicDNS, it is a truly magical solution. If one of your nodes has a hostname of plex, you can simply access it by referring to its hostname (i.e ssh plex@plex). This way you can create a secure tunnel to your homelab from anywhere in the world!\nMonitoring Monitoring can become an important aspect of your homelab after it starts to become something that is relied upon. One of the simplest ways to setup some monitoring is using netdata. It can be installed on individual containers, VMs, and also a hypervisor (such as Proxmox). All of the monitoring works out of the box by detecting disks, memory, network interfaces, etc.\nAdditionally, all of these different agents can be connected to netdata cloud, which can alert you when some of your infrastructure is down or in a degraded state. Adding additional nodes to netdata cloud is as simple as a 1 line shell command.\nGrafana is another popular way of visualizing metrics, although it requires more initial setup.\nIn Summary Building out a homelab can be incredibly rewarding and it doesn\u0026rsquo;t always require buying a rack full of expensive servers to get a significant amount of utility.\n","href":"/blog/2021/09/06/what-to-do-with-a-homelab/","title":"What To Do With A Homelab"},{"content":"AppGate SDP provides a Zero Trust network. This post describes how to get AppGate SDP 4.3.2 working on Arch Linux.\nDepending on the AppGate SDP Server that is running, you may require a client that is more recent than the latest package on AUR. As of right now, the latest AUR is 4.2.2-1.\nThese steps highlight how to get it working with Python3.8 by making a 1 line modification to AppGate source code.\nPackaging We already know the community package is currently out of date, so let\u0026rsquo;s clone it:\ngit clone https://aur.archlinux.org/appgate-sdp.git cd appgate-sdp You\u0026rsquo;ll likely notice that the version is not what we want, so let\u0026rsquo;s modify the PKGBUILD to the following:\n# Maintainer: Pawel Mosakowski \u0026lt;pawel at mosakowski dot net\u0026gt; pkgname=appgate-sdp conflicts=(\u0026#39;appgate-sdp-headless\u0026#39;) pkgver=4.3.2 _download_pkgver=4.3 pkgrel=1 epoch= pkgdesc=\u0026#34;Software Defined Perimeter - GUI client\u0026#34; arch=(\u0026#39;x86_64\u0026#39;) url=\u0026#34;https://www.cyxtera.com/essential-defense/appgate-sdp/support\u0026#34; license=(\u0026#39;custom\u0026#39;) # dependecies calculated by namcap depends=(\u0026#39;gconf\u0026#39; \u0026#39;libsecret\u0026#39; \u0026#39;gtk3\u0026#39; \u0026#39;python\u0026#39; \u0026#39;nss\u0026#39; \u0026#39;libxss\u0026#39; \u0026#39;nodejs\u0026#39; \u0026#39;dnsmasq\u0026#39;) source=(\u0026#34;https://sdpdownloads.cyxtera.com/AppGate-SDP-${_download_pkgver}/clients/${pkgname}_${pkgver}_amd64.deb\u0026#34; \u0026#34;appgatedriver.service\u0026#34;) options=(staticlibs) prepare() { tar -xf data.tar.xz } package() { cp -dpr \u0026#34;${srcdir}\u0026#34;/{etc,lib,opt,usr} \u0026#34;${pkgdir}\u0026#34; mv -v \u0026#34;$pkgdir/lib/systemd/system\u0026#34; \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/lib/systemd/\u0026#34; rm -vrf \u0026#34;$pkgdir/lib\u0026#34; cp -v \u0026#34;$srcdir/appgatedriver.service\u0026#34; \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/lib/systemd/system/appgatedriver.service\u0026#34; mkdir -vp \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/licenses/appgate-sdp\u0026#34; cp -v \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/appgate/copyright\u0026#34; \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/licenses/appgate-sdp\u0026#34; cp -v \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/appgate/LICENSE.github\u0026#34; \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/licenses/appgate-sdp\u0026#34; cp -v \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/appgate/LICENSES.chromium.html.bz2\u0026#34; \u0026#34;$pkgdir/usr/share/licenses/appgate-sdp\u0026#34; } md5sums=(\u0026#39;17101aac7623c06d5fbb95f50cf3dbdc\u0026#39; \u0026#39;002644116e20b2d79fdb36b7677ab4cf\u0026#39;) Let\u0026rsquo;s first make sure we have some dependencies. If you do not have yay, check it out.\nyay -S dnsmasq gconf Now, let\u0026rsquo;s install it:\nmakepkg -si Running the client Ok, let\u0026rsquo;s run the client by executing appgate.\nIt complains about not being able to connect.\nEasy fix:\nsudo systemctl start appgatedriver.service Now we should be connected\u0026hellip; but DNS is not working?\nFixing the DNS Running resolvectl should display that something is not right.\nWhy is the DNS not being set by appgate?\n$ head -3 /opt/appgate/linux/set_dns #!/usr/bin/env python3 \u0026#39;\u0026#39;\u0026#39; This is used to set and unset the DNS. It seems like python3 is required for the DNS setting to happen. Let\u0026rsquo;s try to run it.\n$ sudo /opt/appgate/linux/set_dns /opt/appgate/linux/set_dns:88: SyntaxWarning: \u0026#34;is\u0026#34; with a literal. Did you mean \u0026#34;==\u0026#34;? servers = [( socket.AF_INET if x.version is 4 else socket.AF_INET6, map(int, x.packed)) for x in servers] Traceback (most recent call last): File \u0026#34;/opt/appgate/linux/set_dns\u0026#34;, line 30, in \u0026lt;module\u0026gt; import dbus ModuleNotFoundError: No module named \u0026#39;dbus\u0026#39; Ok, let\u0026rsquo;s install it:\n$ sudo python3.8 -m pip install dbus-python Will it work now? Not yet. There\u0026rsquo;s another issue:\n$ sudo /opt/appgate/linux/set_dns /opt/appgate/linux/set_dns:88: SyntaxWarning: \u0026#34;is\u0026#34; with a literal. Did you mean \u0026#34;==\u0026#34;? servers = [( socket.AF_INET if x.version is 4 else socket.AF_INET6, map(int, x.packed)) for x in servers] module \u0026#39;platform\u0026#39; has no attribute \u0026#39;linux_distribution\u0026#39; This is a breaking change in Python3.8.\nSo what is calling platform.linux_distribution?\nLet\u0026rsquo;s search for it:\n$ sudo grep -r \u0026#39;linux_distribution\u0026#39; /opt/appgate/linux/ /opt/appgate/linux/nm.py: if platform.linux_distribution()[0] != \u0026#39;Fedora\u0026#39;: Aha! So this is in the local AppGate source code. This should be an easy fix. Let\u0026rsquo;s just replace this line with:\nif True: # Since we are not using Fedora :) Wrapping up It turns out there are breaking changes in Python3.8.\nThe docs say Deprecated since version 3.5, will be removed in version 3.8: See alternative like the distro package.\nI suppose this highlights one of the caveats of relying upon the system\u0026rsquo;s python, rather than having an isolated, dedicated environment for all dependencies.\n","href":"/blog/2020/03/16/appgate-sdp-on-arch-linux/","title":"AppGate SDP on Arch Linux"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/python/","title":"python"},{"content":"","href":"/tags/vpn/","title":"vpn"},{"content":"test\n","href":"/page/search/","title":""},{"content":"","href":"/authors/","title":"Authors"},{"content":"","href":"/page/","title":"Pages"}]
\ No newline at end of file
