it is 8 am Sunday morning. i was about to open “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” — a book with one simple truth: if you truly care to understand something, you go slow. that’s not laziness. that’s how you avoid breaking things you can’t fix. i didn’t get to the book. let me tell you why. [OPENING: the power outage — narrative, first-person, slow pace] mid-week, power cut in my building. everything stopped — laptop, internet, work. i sat there useless. and something settled in: this is what invisible infrastructure feels like when it’s gone. i work in cloud. i don’t touch bare metal. but right then, i felt it in the most physical way possible. ...

it is 8 am Sunday morning. i was about to open “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” the book has one quiet truth: if you truly care to understand something, you go slow. not because you’re lazy. because that’s how you avoid breaking things you can’t fix. the fast-and-careless move belongs to someone who doesn’t plan to be around for the consequences. i didn’t get to the book. let me tell you why. ...

the problem so i was working on my PXE boot with iSCSI storage setup, and everything seemed perfect. but there were some things that were missed to make it work after system reboot. what went wrong container services refusing to start kubernetes nodes stuck in NotReady state having to manually fix things after every single reboot if you’re dealing with a similar mess where your PXE/iSCSI setup works until you reboot, this guide should help you out. the issue usually boils down to timing problems between iSCSI connections, mount points, and when services try to start up. ...

Toba Meet Toba the cat, the latest security shield model, equipped with 24/7 surveillance mode and an aggressive defense mechanism when unauthorized movement is detected. 🚨😼 Any attempt to relocate this elite guardian from the server rack results in immediate resistance, accompanied by sharp glares and indignant meows. 🛑🐾 Plan to Host Mastodon on 4 × Raspberry Pis In my current homelab project, I am building a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster to host ~10–50 containers per node. What app will run there? Well, I’ll figure that out along the way, but I’m considering hosting Mastodon. (For those who don’t know, Mastodon is a decentralized microblogging platform.) ...

introduction I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of creating a home data center with Raspberry PIs as a computable instances. However, managing individuals node with SD cards is not fun 😼. So decided to try PXE (Preboot Execution Environment) booting. Instead of dealing with each SD card individually, PXE protocol lets me manage all my RPis from one central server, making updates and further patches easier. In this post, I’ll share how you can set up PXE booting for your RPi fleet and enjoy these benefits to :) ...

UniFi Dream Machine In this blog post, I’ll guide you through the process of setting up a DHCP server on your Synology NAS within a subnet created on a UniFi Dream Machine Special Edition (UDM SE). Synology NAS Prerequisites Before we start, ensure you have the following: UDM SE: UniFi Dream Machine Special Edition. Synology NAS: Network Attached Storage device from Synology. Raspberry Pi: Any model will suffice. Ethernet cables: To connect your devices. Step-by-Step Guide 1. Create a Subnet on UDM SE Log in to your UniFi Router: Access your UDM SE via the UniFi Network application. ...

RPI 5 on Ubuntu 24.04 (headless): Connect to WiFi / Mobile Hotspot Introduction In my free time, I enjoy tinkering with my home lab, exploring new projects and challenges. Recently, I decided to connect my Raspberry Pi 5 to a mobile hotspot—a seemingly straightforward task. However, it turned out not so smooth. In this post, I’ll walk you through how I resolved the error brcmfmac: brcmf_set_channel: set chanspec fail, reason -52 and successfully connected Raspberry Pi to a mobile hotspot. ...

Introduction UML diagrams play a crucial role in software engineering for visualizing and structuring information. This article explores the seamless automation of UML diagram creation using ChatGPT (LLM) and the PlantUML tool. The aim is to provide a valuable resource for Solutions Architects and engineers looking to efficiently communicate and pitch ideas through visual representations. In this tutorial, we’ll focus on visualization of the high-level system design of Netflix. By the end of this article, you’ll have a clear understanding of how ChatGPT and PlantUML can be harnessed to expedite the visualization of systems design while saving time on learning PlatUML syntax. ...

EBS Volumes Storage volumes you can attach to your EC2 instances. Mission Critical 🟢 production workloads. designed for mission critical workloads 🟢 highly available. automatically replicated within a single AZ to protect against hardware failures. 🟢 scalable. dynamically increase capacity and chnage the volume type with no downtime or performance impact to your live systems. EBS Volume Types: Solid State Disk General Purpose SSD (gp2) - legacy 3 IOPS per GiB, up to maximum of 16,000 IOPS per volume regardless of how large the volume is, the maximum number of input/output operations the storage system can handle for that volume is 16,000 per second. this is the upper limit on the performance you can expect from the volume. ...

S3 is Object-Based Storage Manages data as objects rather then in file systmes or data blocks. Upload any file type you can think of to S3. Examples include photos, videos, code, documents, and text files. Cannot be used to run an OS or DB. S3 Basics Unlimited storage. The total amount of data and the number of objects you can store is unlimited. Objects up to 5 TB in Size. S3 objects can range in size from a minimum of 0 bytes to a maximum of 5 TB. S3 Buckets. Store files in buckets (similar to folders). Tired Storage. Offers a range of storage classes designed for different use cases. Lifecycle Management. Defines automatically transition objects to a cheaper tier or delete objects that are no longer required after a set of period of time. Versioning. All versions of an object are stored and can be retrived, including deleted objects. Once enabled, versioning cannot be disabled - only suspended. Supports MFA, so you need to procced with 2-factor in order to delete an object. If you enabled public access to versioned objects, old versions will not be accessible. Working with S3 Buckets Universal Namespace. All AWS accounts share the S3 namespace. Each S3 bucket name is globally unique. ...