Stuart Howlette @yetiops@fosstodon.org

What is it with this year? First Neil Peart, then Terry Jones, and now Sean Reinhert?

Absolutely gutted. Death's Human is amazing, Cynic's Focus is sublime, and Traced In Air was, and still is, one of my favourite progressive albums of all time.

RIP Sean

I appeared on the Admin Admin Podcast talking about Prometheus, plus a little bit about Saltstack too.

https://www.adminadminpodcast.co.uk/ep080/

Definitely bitten by the podcast bug, I want to do more!

I put together a blog on using OpenBSD to create a highly available firewall pair.

I'm still fairly new to OpenBSD in terms of experience, so I'm sure I've probably got something wrong, let me know if so!

https://stuarthowlette.me.uk/posts/openbsd-firewall-ha/

Now Playing:
Kamelot - Forever, from the album Karma.

I seem to have gotten back into Power/Epic Metal today. Good.

Taking me a bit to get back into blogging again, but heres my take on Consul and Prometheus working together for Blackbox and SNMP exporter checks

https://stuarthowlette.me.uk/posts/prometheus-consul-blackbox/

Quite enjoying this dashboard I put together. Once I start integrating BGP properly, I'll have some more useful stats on there too.

The joy of Prometheus, SNMP, and equipment that supports it.

Goddamnit. RIP Neil. Through Rush and every band you've influenced (including all my previous bands), I am thankful.

And so it is done. All my required tasks for the home network migration are done.

A couple of extra bits (some db/radius failover) will be done in time, but I'm happy right now.

And of course monitoring it in Prometheus gives me lovely graphs too! 🤘

It took longer than I thought to get around to finishing this off (Christmas kicked in just as I was in the middle of it).

Everything is now in the right network.

Firewalling/proper segmentation tomorrow, and then I think I can concentrate on some of the enhancements I wanted to implement (always-on VPNs, nice FreeRADIUS frontend, etc).

Pretty much every metric in my network is discovered by Prometheus through Consul now.

Relabelling is making more and more sense, which means half of the config I did to move to Consul now needs doing again anyway!

Never been this excited over a monitoring system before. Safe to say I'm hooked.

Finally redoing my Prometheus configuration so all of it comes from Consul service discovery. Previously, only services running on nodes that could run the Consul agent were discovered.

Now all my blackbox checks are going to it, and the SNMP ones will go next.

This is fun. If I could marry a technology/project, it would be Prometheus.

Dropbox migration mostly over, other than finding a way to share files publicly.

I don't want my "home" Nextcloud instance to be available outside of a VPN, and I backup to Backblaze if I need access to files myself somewhere else. This doesn't solve the issue of sharing with others though

Probably gonna make a public instance and federate, but we'll see.

Compared to some of the other gamepads I've used in the past, this feels wonderful.

Untitled Goose Game is getting upgraded controls.

Started playing with rclone today, and I'm a fan. The move away from Dropbox finally begins

For context, this was it before....

I wondered why I wasn't able to go in this room for a couple of days.

Turned out my wife was remodelling it for my birthday (although I was allowed in two days early!)

I'm a lucky guy.

Grew tired of LDAP/AD, decided to mess around with HA OpenBSD firewalling. Future blog post probable.

The network move slowed down a bit, free time dried up a little.

Also, it turns out moving your nameservers and DHCP servers in one go to a different subnet was more work than I'd expected. The rest should be much easier.

I recently setup some checks in Prometheus using DNS Service Discovery, and thought I'd put a post together for those who need to work out how to do the same

https://stuarthowlette.me.uk/posts/prometheus-srv-discovery/

Still have all this to do to finish off the home network. Gonna be fun!