Mike Tobias

Gitlab CI/CD at Home

While many people are familiar with the concepts of dev-ops (and if you aren't, Amazon has a pretty good definition), we often think of dev-ops in an enterprise context. For a home lab, there are quite a few applications for utilizing dev-ops concepts at home. For general dev-ops concepts I highly recommend taking a look at Techno Tim's content. Tim's content covers quite a few home lab topics and puts out almost weekly Youtube videos. For our purposes we are going to be utilizing Gitlab.com repos to orchestrate code and systems in our home lab!

M2 Air Monitor Limitations

While I use a MacBook Pro for work, I use an M2 MacBook Air for personal projects around the house. I have used a Plugable Thunderbolt dock for the past few years to run the display for my gaming PC, work Mac, and any other system I may have sitting around. The monitor I use is a Samsung CRG9 49" "super" ultra wide. This size monitor is quite nice for a single monitor setup and allows me to have a good spread of windows throughout the day.

Grav Tag Filters

Grav CMS! It is what is powering this site! As I work my way through understanding more about Grav, I hope to document some of the issues and fun things I run into.

Today's adventure is related to the Taxonomy List plugin, a nice plugin that allows custom tags to be applied to pages.

The Taxonomy List plugin allows you to specify a page route to your blog, which defaults to /blog. I was finding that even though the plugin was enabled, the link to the filter didn't seem to be working. My blog URL is https://mktbs.net/blog but I was finding that any link from the Popular Tags was linking to https://mktbs.net/tag:homelab, somewhere, the /blog URI was missing.

Linux Shell SSH/No Root One-Liner

Having a scripts for repeatable system administration saves times and reduces human errors. The following lines can be used in shell scripts (I tend to use bash) or in the cloud-init data of a cloud provider. I tend to have this script and the public key of an SSH key in a public Git repo that I just clone into a new VPS and execute. This should work on modern Debian and Red Hat Linux variants such as Ubuntu 22.02 and CentOS (RIP).

Grav CMS

For the past few years I've been running my (mostly) inactive website via Gitlab pages, serving statically generated pages from Hugo. Static site generators like Hugo and Jekyll take markdown, join it with some images and CSS, convert it all to html, and there you have a website which can be served from just about anywhere. Small file sizes and no "moving parts" can result in a much faster and "secure" website. Of course there will always be security issues with the host, but you aren't serving content out of a database.

While this process worked for a while, especially since I don't put out much content, I wanted something a bit more interactive, not something as indepth as a Wordpress, but something a bit more involved. While I can deal with CSS, I don't want to. Enter Grav. Grav is a CMS like, Wordpress, but unlike Wordpress does't rely on a database component. All flat files.