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Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to make it easier to manage my homelab. In order of implementation: Set up local services: DHCP, DNS, VLANs, etc. Standardize on Proxmox as a virtualization platform. Learn Ansible to manage the growing number of machines, physical and virtual. Populate my local instance of Netbox with IP ranges, addresses, and hardware information. Throuhought, document it all on my local wiki. But at some point, running Ansible over and over again to keep things up to date became both tedious and error probe. What happens when I want to run an Ansible playbook to automatically update Netbox with new IP address information from a VM? And I want to do it automatically. ...

Part of my 2024 goal was to make my homelab easier to manage: spinning up virtual machines, rolling out updates, generally managing things should take less work. That includes managing the inventory of homelab machines, a mix of bare metal, virtual machines, or containers on a Proxmox cluster. Things start with a source of truth, what I hope to use Netbox. Netbox contains APIs for managing inventories of IP addresses and prefixes, machines, virtual machines, etc. ...

Ever since I was able to share the Internet connection among the several computers we had at home 30+ years ago, I’ve always found it interesting the many ways computers can connect. First I learned about IPv4, then VPNs such as OpenVPN and Wireguard, and now IPv6. Fast forward several years, and after running a IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnel thanks to Hurricane Electric, my ISP provided a delegation of IPv6 addresses which I could share among my machines. Several more years later, I wondered, how much IPv6 was I using instead of IPv4 now that all my internal machines had IPv6 addresses? I knew about ntop and how it provides visualiations for traffic analysis. Figuring out how to wire it up to my network, and explaining it, is the point of this post. ...

The problem: I keep getting connection refused when trying to view the consoles of VMs. Why? Background: My home lab runs Proxmox on 3 physical machines (moon1, 2, and 3). Each Proxmox host runs several VMs. To access the Proxmox Web UI, keepalived+haproxy is configured to provide a single IP address for loadbalancing and TCP-connection proxying to the Proxmox UI via https://proxmox.mylocal.lan. From the Proxmox UI, when I click on Console for a particular VM, I’m greeted with the following error: ...

That feeling when you realize it’s been almost a year since your last post, and one of your new year’s goals was to write more. So when I broke out the website repo to get back to writing, I found the workflows I use to deploy the site were broken. The site’s repository is hosted on Github. I use (Firebase) for the actual serving. When the Github action attempted to push an update to Firebase, the action produced the following error: ...