David 
It’s been several months since I first started planning the homelab upgrade but I’ve finally got round to making the first steps. The initial step was to replace my Ubuntu based hypervisor with Proxmox. As the rest of my home network runs on the same host I couldn’t afford to leave it offline for long. … Read more
When I first started the homelab it was intended to be used mainly for learning. However, as time has gone on I’ve ended up using it more for home infrastructure. This has resulted in an infrastructure that is fairly fragile and difficult to make changes in, defeating the purpose of using it as a learning … Read more
When writing scripts it is often useful to know which step is currently being executed. We can do this by periodically printing a status message to the screen but PowerShell provides a more elegant way in the form of the Write-Progress cmdlet. Using this cmdlet we can print the current status to the screen only … Read more
Traditionally when we assign DNS servers to hosts we assign more than one. For example, we may assign 8.8.8.8 as a primary an 8.8.4.4 as a secondary so in the unlikely event that one is ever down, we have a second one to fall back on. When we set up a single Pi-hole server with … Read more
The logging module provides the capacity to create multiple logger objects each with different properties, allowing for flexibility over the routing of log messages. By using logging instead of print statements to provide feedback on the operation of our code we make it more maintainable and easier to home in on the specific information needed when investigating bugs.
Tar is a common file archive format on Linux and other UNIX or UNIX-like systems. Like the zip file format, the tar format allows you to combine multiple files in to a single archive. Tar provides many options for compression and file formats making it suitable for many use cases. However, it has gained a … Read more
Ubiquiti’s UniFi product lineup has seen enormous growth in popularity due to its range of high quality access points. While you will usually find professional grade access points in businesses instead of homes, they provide a benefit in any building. This is especially true for large homes or older buildings with thick walls where a … Read more
In a multi-site network you will most likely have VPNs connecting your sites, allowing remote connectivity to your main site. However, as these links are not necessarily 100% reliable, a dropped link could potentially result in the loss of monitoring data for a large number of hosts as the agent does not store any data … Read more
Earlier this month, Zabbix server 5.0 LTS was released. Version 5.0 brings an updated UI, additional cloud integrations and support for the latest Zabbix agent (the old agent is still supported so you don’t need to upgrade the agent on all your hosts immediately). If you are using Zabbix Proxy to monitor some of your … Read more
While Zabbix can monitor a lot about the system state through agent and SNMP checks, there are situations where you may want to directly send a notification to Zabbix to inform it of a particular system state or notify it that an action has been performed. One example might be if you want to monitor … Read more