Technology

Not too long ago I set up a few IP cameras around the house. As I work mostly from home, I wanted a non-proprietary and cost effective way to monitor four video feeds at any time while I’m in my study. This blog post details the solution I came up with, which leverages a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and an old monitor I had lying around. Before blindly following the instructions in this post, please consider the caveats!...

I’m one of the (probably) few people that still dual-boot Windows and Linux. There are plenty things that are easier for me to do on a Linux host rather than in Windows, even with WSL being quite useful these days. An example of this is virtualization related experiments (specifically with Qemu/KVM). A little while back I started writing an upcoming blog post while booted into Linux and took some screenshots that I wanted to use for it....

Raspberry Pi’s are great little devices for various purposes. I’ve got a couple of Pi4’s for my homelab. That said, you’d probably be lying to me if you told me you were enthusiastic about the following scenario, especially if you make a lot of changes and/or try a lot of different operating system versions: Unplug Pi Remove storage device (SD/SSD) Plug storage device into PC Flash OS image to device Unplug device from PC Plug back into Pi Plug Pi back in Configure Pi after it boots I developed a solution for my homelab which allows me to re-provision my Pis on demand using a more traditional remote-provisioning paradigm, without having to touch any of them....

If you’ve ever had to export and move volumes from one OpenStack cloud to another, you may know the following process: converting a Cinder volume to a Glance image to allow you to download it so that the reverse process can be applied when importing it. This is obviously a laborious process, especially if there are a ton of volumes to port. I recently had to do a bulk import of more than 100 volumes in qcow2 format for a client migrating to our cloud....

Context A client reached out to me a little while ago to ask if it was possible to recover access to a VM that one of his clients use. This Ubuntu 22.04 based VM runs on our OpenStack cloud, powered by QEMU/KVM. The client’s client had made some modifications to /etc/ssh/sshd_config and subsequently locked themselves out of the machine. It’s important to note here that cloud instances (VMs) typically don’t include a default password set and rely solely on key-pair authentication via SSH....