I recently switched my home lab from ProxMox VMs to HashiCorp Nomad, Consul, Vault and containers running on bare metal servers, and I needed a way to monitor this stack, my applications as well as external systems that I care about.

I’ve been setting up a small home lab for testing various things out and I needed some space for virtual machines. I don’t have any requirements for insane performance, but I also didn’t want a really sluggish setup, so here’s what I did…

As you may have noticed, this site is now served over HTTPS!

IE6 users, you’re pretty much SOL since I turned off all your cipher suites. It’s 2014 and it’s probably a pretty good time to get yourself a slightly newer browser anyway.

Overview

This guide will help you setup a highly available NFS server on Debian Wheezy. This is a relatively battle-tested configuration, and there is plenty information out there on how it works - I’ll include some links at the end of this post.

I was using GlusterFS up until recently, but I’m not happy with file corruption issues I’m seeing, and the insane load it puts on 2 rather beefy servers trying to resync data after one fails for just a short time.

Over the past few hours we’ve been on the receiving end of a fairly large scale set of web requests (read: attack) to a website we host over on Amazon EC2. Our setup is not really that complicated, however we encountered a problem that wasn’t that easy to solve.

This is the first post of (hopefully) many, detailing some of my Puppet module implementations. Being the first, I thought I would start off with something simple.