Today in "Keep your homelab up to date":

I updated all but one device from OpenWRT 24.10.5 to 24.10.6 and then to 25.12.1, using my custom-built images as usual (the images contain things like python, sudo or rsync to make the device manageable via Ansible and backupable via dirvish).

The one device that makes problems is a AVM FritzRepeater 1750E. After a lot of swearing and debugging, I installed a 25.12.1 image via the recovery (FTP for the win, ahem). Unfortunately this meant that I lost all the configuration on the device. And for reasons unknown to me it now refuses to restore the configuration (which involves a networking change from plain network to VLAN-based setup with a different IP range).

Next step: Go back to 24.10.6 and try to restore the configuration there...

#OpenWRT #HomeLab #HellYeah #AdminLife #SelfHosting #AVM

I got my hands on some Lenovo Thinkcentre M700 SFF recently and am impressed by the quality of the whole setup. Sure, replacing the SSD means tearing apart half of the case, but it is really easy and comfortable. The case is a beast, not sure who would win if it was hit by a car...

Funnily enough, the first couple of boots I could get screen output via DisplayPort, but for unknown reasons the machine decided to only show the UEFI/BIOS output via VGA. Luckily, I still have a monitor that accepts VGA input...

Does anyone know if there is a switch in the firmware to fix this? I did not find anything, but as the firmware menu is enormous, maybe I just missed it? As it worked before it should be possible...

#homelab #HellYeah #Linux #SelfHosting #DevOps #Lenovo #ThinkCentre #M700SFF

I think it is really sad that with the license change vagrant has dropped in everybody's perception. There are many projects no longer caring about vagrant (due to the reduced number of users) and no longer building or publishing vagrant boxes. Alpine is stuck at 3.19, Debian13 download is broken for months, Fedora is stuck at 39. (I never could get the openSUSE publisher working, so I take the blame for that).

I still like the vagrant workflow, having a easy way to create shareable environments. I really like it in combination with Ansible to easily have demo setups or playgrounds.

This far I did not find a replacement. Alternatives are either not as universally usable or are lacking features like the Ansible integration. I'll keep on looking...

#Vagrant #DevOps #AdminLife #HellYeah #Hashicorp

Today in "Fun with your homelab":

One of my openSUSE MicroOS machines was under heavy load for a week and I could not find out what was wrong. I noticed that SSH logins were no longer possible, the login hung after the "Last login ..." line. Non-interactive logins worked, though.

Today I found out that suddenly this machine requires "ssh -t" or the RequestTTY option to get a working SSH connection. Huh?

All other MicroOS machines are of course unaffected by this (SSH from the same laptop to those machines works without "-t"), otherwise life would not be interesting...

Debugging this and then checking where the high load comes from...

#Linux #SSH #openSUSE #MicroOS #homelab #HellYeah #AdminLife

As Hetzner is deprecating dns configuration via the dns-console, I migrated my domains to the new Cloud API. Last piece of the puzzle was to create new tokens and move from the old cert-manager-webhook-hetzner (by vadimkim) to the official chart maintained by Hetzner.

Migrated my 7 kubernetes clusters (k3s, rke2, OpenShift) without major hiccups, only had to do some cleanup due to old acme challenge entries being leftover after the migration (as cert-manager could not remove them without the new webhook and API token).

Only things left are the machines without k3s using lego.

#homelab #hetzner #certmanager #dns #hellyeah #kubernetes #k3s #rke2