I am now Azure certified, I passed my AZ-104 cert a few weeks ago. I’ve been using both Azure and AWS for years now, and wanted to sit down and actually get certified. On my list next would be the Azure Architect cert and then move on to getting my AWS certs. You can view my badge here

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! to all, I will try and post more in 2024!

I moved fabianbrash.com from running on DOKS to running inside of an s3 bucket fronted by cloudfront, but why? Simple cost. DO has a great k8s offering but their last round of price increases meant that I would now be paying over $90/month for 3 small k8s nodes, and even with the fact that I deployed other APPS into the cluster, I just couldn’t justify the cost, so I switched. I am also going to look into how to host other APPS I make in the future, I do have access to internal k8s clusters, but I have no interest in opening those up to the outside world and deal with the security risks that come with that.

I’ve passed my CKA!!!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here but I’ve been quite busy, I’ve started to study for my CKA, plus I’ve been doing some React/Next.js/Redux work. I’ve built a couple of apps and I’m hosting them on Vercel check them out below. Hulu 2.0 Tesla Clone I hope to add some more to the above list, one app I’m thinking about is building a crypto bank app using Next.

Well after thinking about migrating from Wordpress I’ve actually done it, I’ve migrated the blog over to Hugo a static site generator; I will have a full write up on the reasons behind me migrating off of Wordpress but for now I just wanted to write something quick and get the infra in place to make the move. More to come…

I’ve passed my CKAD! this is a little delayed because I’ve been super busy.

Happy New Year to all, I have big things planned for my blog this year, stay tuned…

Hello All, well new year and new theme I’ve also updated to the latest version of Wordpress and this time without crapping up my database. I hope to add new content to the page this year. Also towards the end of last year I took and passed my VCP, so I am now a VCP5-DCV I hope my first of a few certs I would like to get.

Another quick one. So I just learned about a new feature in Docker Desktop in which Docker Desktop can create a Dockerfile just by examining the code in your directory tree, which is pretty cool, so I updated my version of Docker Desktop to take advantage of this new feature, and it re-enforced my belief that Devs should not manually create Dockerfiles. Let’s have a look at the output from the command docker init # syntax=docker/dockerfile:1 # Comments are provided throughout this file to help you get started.

Well, I’ve built my first web app, it’s hosted on DigitalOcean, here it uses Bootstrap for the frontend with some skinning by MDB and the backend is SailsJS utilizing Mongo for a DB.

Another quick one. So I just learned about a new feature in Docker Desktop in which Docker Desktop can create a Dockerfile just by examining the code in your directory tree, which is pretty cool, so I updated my version of Docker Desktop to take advantage of this new feature, and it re-enforced my belief that Devs should not manually create Dockerfiles. Let’s have a look at the output from the command docker init # syntax=docker/dockerfile:1 # Comments are provided throughout this file to help you get started.

I’ve passed my CKA!!!

Well after thinking about migrating from Wordpress I’ve actually done it, I’ve migrated the blog over to Hugo a static site generator; I will have a full write up on the reasons behind me migrating off of Wordpress but for now I just wanted to write something quick and get the infra in place to make the move. More to come…

So I ran into an interesting issue today, I had provisioned a new k8s cluster using kubeADM but I replaced docker with containerD, everything was smooth and then I deployed prometheus and grafana using helm, and I noticed that I couldn’t connect grafana to prometheus I had installed istio so I thought that was the issue, maybe by default istio was messing with the pods network communication, but I also noticed that when I tried to install a dashboard from grafana I received an error, so the container couldn’t reach grafana.

I’ve passed my CKAD! this is a little delayed because I’ve been super busy.

It seems my mariadb container restarted which caused the site to become unstable, I killed both my front end pods and let k8s restart them and it all seems to be working right now, I need to do some investigation as to why the DB restarted.

So I had some challenges getting this up and running but I found a few blog post that helped me out: Setting up a vSphere lab with CoreDNS in Docker https://dev.to/robbmanes/running-coredns-as-a-dns-server-in-a-container-1d0 the first issue I had was a lot of Linux distros use systemd-resolved I am using photon OS and of course it does also so the first thing to do is sudo systemctl stop systemd-resolved sudo systemct disable systemd-resolved the reason for this is it consumes udp 53 which you’re container needs to run on the next issue I had was usually I can docker exec bash into a container, well this container is slim and I mean slim there is not bash no anything I kept getting an OCI error when I attempted to run any exec commands so I had to use the below docker command docker run -d -p 53:53/udp --rm --name coredns -v /static_content/coredns_config/:/root/ coredns/coredns -conf /root/Corefile again big help from the above blog postings.

I have created a umds stack file and have begun running umds on a single node docker swarm, also this version is using nginx as a web server instead of the simple http server python provides—the stack file can be found here Please stay tuned I will have a full write up on this soon…

Another quick one. So I just learned about a new feature in Docker Desktop in which Docker Desktop can create a Dockerfile just by examining the code in your directory tree, which is pretty cool, so I updated my version of Docker Desktop to take advantage of this new feature, and it re-enforced my belief that Devs should not manually create Dockerfiles. Let’s have a look at the output from the command docker init # syntax=docker/dockerfile:1 # Comments are provided throughout this file to help you get started.

So I have created a docker container for umds 6.7 please check it out on docker hub, I also have a complete write up as to how to use the container.

So I’ve run into this error everytime I’ve cloned my site or pretty much any Hugo template, but it was really annoying for me when it comes to my personal blog, I would clone my private git repo and try to build my site and I would see the below error message WARN 2024/02/06 07:26:21 found no layout file for "html" for kind "page": You should create a template file which matches Hugo Layouts Lookup Rules for this combination.

Well after thinking about migrating from Wordpress I’ve actually done it, I’ve migrated the blog over to Hugo a static site generator; I will have a full write up on the reasons behind me migrating off of Wordpress but for now I just wanted to write something quick and get the infra in place to make the move. More to come…

I’ve passed my CKA!!!

Well after thinking about migrating from Wordpress I’ve actually done it, I’ve migrated the blog over to Hugo a static site generator; I will have a full write up on the reasons behind me migrating off of Wordpress but for now I just wanted to write something quick and get the infra in place to make the move. More to come…

So I ran into an interesting issue today, I had provisioned a new k8s cluster using kubeADM but I replaced docker with containerD, everything was smooth and then I deployed prometheus and grafana using helm, and I noticed that I couldn’t connect grafana to prometheus I had installed istio so I thought that was the issue, maybe by default istio was messing with the pods network communication, but I also noticed that when I tried to install a dashboard from grafana I received an error, so the container couldn’t reach grafana.

I’ve passed my CKAD! this is a little delayed because I’ve been super busy.

It seems my mariadb container restarted which caused the site to become unstable, I killed both my front end pods and let k8s restart them and it all seems to be working right now, I need to do some investigation as to why the DB restarted.

Well I decided to upgrade my k8s cluster this morning to see what kind of damage I could inflict on the site, well a lot I took it down, I think a huge part of it is, I am only running 2 nodes and they are 2×4(2CPU, 4GB of RAM) and there just wasn’t enough resource once the rolling upgrade began. Also once the upgrade was complete my front end deployment was still broken I am running a service mesh and it seems the proxies timed-out waiting for resources, so the deployment was half up half down; luckily this was a simple fix, kubectl rollout restart deploy my_deploy again I think the core issue here is just not enough resource in the cluster.

So I ran into an issue today, I was deploying TAP on a TKGm cluster on-prem and I went with one of the available t-shirt sizes for my nodes — After I deployed TAP I noticed that the buildservice kept failing so I started to do a little troubleshooting, and when I checked the events I noticed that their were errors regarding disk pressure on the nodes and the pods being evicted, and then I remembered that TAP requires a minimum of 70GB of disk space on the worker nodes and I only had 40GB.

So at my new job I’ve been learning TAP(Tanzu Application Platform) and as apart of that I’ve had to setup a domain so I can build new apps and serve them from that domain, so obviously I just picked a domain from a list of domains that I own, and the domain I chose was alexanderbrash.dev; simple enough, but then I noticed that when I tried to access the TAP GUI in Chrome or Firefox I was getting redirected to the https version of the site and of course I hadn’t setup any certs or anything I was just messing around, even if I used an incognito window or tab, same thing, every time I would go to http://tap-gui.

So I just had to renew my letsencrypt certificate for my VCSA and ran into a few issues and I wanted to write them down here, so I will go through creating the cert and adding it to your VCSA in the below blog post. I will assume you have certbot only installed on your machine Let’s create our cert certbot certonly -d myservice.domain.com --manual --preferred-challenges dns --agree-tos -m mail@mail.com Of course make changes as needed from the above command, then follow the instructions to add a TXT record to your DNS provider Now comes the tricky bit of assemblying the certificate in a way that your VCSA will accept it and not choke, the below blog helped out quite a bit.

So I just had to renew my letsencrypt certificate for my VCSA and ran into a few issues and I wanted to write them down here, so I will go through creating the cert and adding it to your VCSA in the below blog post. I will assume you have certbot only installed on your machine Let’s create our cert certbot certonly -d myservice.domain.com --manual --preferred-challenges dns --agree-tos -m mail@mail.com Of course make changes as needed from the above command, then follow the instructions to add a TXT record to your DNS provider Now comes the tricky bit of assemblying the certificate in a way that your VCSA will accept it and not choke, the below blog helped out quite a bit.

So I just had to renew my letsencrypt certificate for my VCSA and ran into a few issues and I wanted to write them down here, so I will go through creating the cert and adding it to your VCSA in the below blog post. I will assume you have certbot only installed on your machine Let’s create our cert certbot certonly -d myservice.domain.com --manual --preferred-challenges dns --agree-tos -m mail@mail.com Of course make changes as needed from the above command, then follow the instructions to add a TXT record to your DNS provider Now comes the tricky bit of assemblying the certificate in a way that your VCSA will accept it and not choke, the below blog helped out quite a bit.

So I ran into an interesting issue today, I had provisioned a new k8s cluster using kubeADM but I replaced docker with containerD, everything was smooth and then I deployed prometheus and grafana using helm, and I noticed that I couldn’t connect grafana to prometheus I had installed istio so I thought that was the issue, maybe by default istio was messing with the pods network communication, but I also noticed that when I tried to install a dashboard from grafana I received an error, so the container couldn’t reach grafana.

I just wanted to write a post on the differences between VMware’s Linux based UMDS 6.7 vs 6.5, one big change is that postgres is no longer required in 6.7. So here is a quick walkthrough in installing UMDS 6.7.x I will be using CentOS 7 minimal, mount your VCSA 6.7 DVD inside your cent VM and copy the VMware-UMDS-6.7.0-10164201.tar.gz from the umds directory to anywhere you desire /tmp is a good place.

So I wanted to enable Syslog on my PSC’s, VCSA’s, and on my Esxi servers and while enabling Syslog on the PSC’s and VCSA’s are pretty straight forward I did run into a bit of an issue enabling it on Esxi. The big gotcha is make certain the service is running, and that the firewall rule is enabled to allow UDP 514 or TCP 514 “Outbound” just like the pics below.

So in my home lab I had to shutdown my server so I could add some memory and when I started everything back up I noticed that I few of my VM’s in my nested vSAN cluster had inaccessible next to them, so I started Googling around and I found the solution below: SSH into the vCenter that hosts your vSAN cluster(s) and then execute the below commands: rvc administrator@vsphere.local@localhost vsan.

So I had an issue trying to upgrade from ESXi 5.5 to 6.0, for some reason the upgrade process would not recognize the RAID 1 that ESXi was installed, after looking around I realized that the HP Smart Array firmware was on 3.x so I loaded the HP SPP which upgraded the firmware to 6.x, and viola, drive showed up during the upgrade process. Lesson here, keep your servers firmware up to date.

Ran into an issue today in which our gitlab server running in a docker container using VMware’s photonOS 1.x ran out of disk space on the /root partition by default this partition is only ~15GB; while the container was still running and I could log into gitlab I couldn’t clone any repos. The solution, simply add space to the disk in vCenter and boot the VM into GParted live an extend /dev/sda1 in my case, reboot, and all was good Thank goodness for GParted Live.

So I had to call VMware support today because I noticed on all of our Esxi 6.5 hosts when I attempted to run services.sh restart I received the following message “Errors: Invalid operation requested: This ruleset is required and cannot be disabled” which made no sense to me as I am accustomed to seeing all services restart when I entered that command. But after a brief communication with VMware support they informed me that that was the new expected behavior for that command, and in order to see the services restart, I need to run the following command " services.

So here is my home lab config while I’ve seen others use servers built from SuperMicro or Intel NUC’s I wanted to build a lab as cheap as possible, so I went to eBay and got old enterprise gear, and they are as follows: HP DL380 G5 server(1) HP DL360 G5 server(1) Cisco 3750-E switch(1)(24 1Gb ports + 2 10Gb ports) I am currently running Esxi 6.0 with 2 external PSC’s and 2 VCSA’s in enhanced linked mode, I am currently rebuilding my lab and the new config will be 1 external PSC and 1 VCSA running 6.

Hello All, over the next few weeks I will be adding some posts here around my home lab config and my move to 10Gb networking—I will lay out some of the pitfalls and lessons learned, and I will lay out my config. So let’s get started…

Well after thinking about migrating from Wordpress I’ve actually done it, I’ve migrated the blog over to Hugo a static site generator; I will have a full write up on the reasons behind me migrating off of Wordpress but for now I just wanted to write something quick and get the infra in place to make the move. More to come…

I’ve upgraded WordPress to v5.5.1 let’s see how many issues I run into, every time I do an upgrade I find little crazy bugs.

I am working on migrating my blog to a managed Kubernetes platform, more than likely it will be DigitalOcean, more to come…

I’ve noticed a few issues on the site with the recent upgrade to 5.x—-Fixes coming soon.

I’ve noticed some performance issues since enabling TLS, I’m working on finding the root cause.

The site was down earlier today so I could migrate my WordPress blog into my root directory—The migration is now complete, next up SSL.

I have upgraded Wordpress to version 3.8; I am really enjoying the new UI… great update

I’ve renewed my TLS certificate, sorry for the inconvenience

I’ve completed enabling TLS site wide, I will continue to test to make certain everything is working properly.

Well, I’ve built my first web app, it’s hosted on DigitalOcean, here it uses Bootstrap for the frontend with some skinning by MDB and the backend is SailsJS utilizing Mongo for a DB.

Well, I’ve built my first web app, it’s hosted on DigitalOcean, here it uses Bootstrap for the frontend with some skinning by MDB and the backend is SailsJS utilizing Mongo for a DB.

So I had an issue today in which I kept getting an error message when I attempted to upgrade my ubuntu server, it basically said I was out of disk space, which was odd as I had a 2TB drive as this is a Plex server, after running df -h I quickly noticed that /boot was @ 100% full, so after a quick Google I found the below solution. If /boot is 100% full you will not be able to just run ‘sudo apt-get autoremove’ you’ll receive a bunch of error messages, so you will have to manually delete some files.

Well after quite a bit of looking around, I don’t think I can recover my posts, I will continue to look for a solution, but I will probably just have to start from scratch, which is not entirely a bad thing.

I have completely messed up my SQL database, so all my posts are gone, hopefully I can find a solution soon…