I recently set up Homepage which offers an application/service dashboard for my resources. For a small home lab this works well, and it is very handy to have an easy to access dashboard like this available. It offers integration and widgets for a whole slew of services like Plex, Uptime Kuma and Synology. It even has native icmp based monitoring built in. All in all, it’s pretty slick!

phpIPAM to Homepage automates services.yaml creation based on information from phpIPAM for larger lab environments

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Home Assistant has the ability to read and write NFC tags via the Companion App but using this on an iPhone is a bit cumbersome as Apple doesn’t allow that apps read NFC tags and do an action without a confirmation from the user. This default setting makes sense, as I don’t want random NFC’s triggering events on my phone, but there is no way of overriding this behaviour even for known tags — which sometimes defeats the purpose of having NFC tags automate actions and events in Home Assistant. There is, however, a way to work around this limitation.

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The freshly made public Ghostty terminal emulator by Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder of Hashicorp) is all the rage at the moment, and it definitely looks interesting!

The first real issue I had with it, was when using SSH to connect to remote resources. This produced the missing or unsuitable terminal: xterm-ghostty error message, because the remote resource doesn’t have the xterm-ghostty terminfo defined. The official Ghostty docs has some workarounds for it, but these are either to convoluted like copying terminfo entries to all remote systems, or setting SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color in .ssh/config for each remote host. The other alternative is to set SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color system wide but that also affects other terminal emulators (as does setting it in .ssh/config)

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At this years VMware Explore 2024 in Barcelona, I did a presentation called CMTY1321BCN: Beware Of The Rogue VMs!, a recording of the session is also available on the VMware Explore 2024 Community YouTube channel. Here is a quick text based recap of it.

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This last week I attended VMware Explore 2024 in Barcelona. While at was at the conference, I had a small ESP32 board with an external antenna in my backpack, connected to a powerbank. The sole purpose of this little device, was to provide some fun random WiFI SSID’s, and to see if anyone actually connected to it.

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For a while now I’ve been looking at travel routers, in order to have something small and portable I can bring with me wherever I go. After some research, I ended up purchasing a GL-iNet Opal (GL-SFT1200) Travel Router. The device seems to tick all the boxes for my requirements, including WireGuard VPN and DNS encryption

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Back in 2018 I outlined My Pi-Hole Setup and while the setup is still mostly the same some things have naturally evolved from there. That being said, Pi-Hole has been rock solid for all these years, and is still my main go-to for blocking ads and trackers from my home network devices. Since that post from 2018, I have done a few changes.

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Since baselines are deprecated in vSphere version 8 and baselines are restricted to only VMware-provided content after ESXi 7.0.3 Update P I helped one of my customers to move over to image based updating via vLCM. This has not gone by without any issues as mentioned in my previous post.

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The content catalog for VMware Explore 2024 Barcelona is now live! Scheduling will open on the 24th of September 2024, but you can start favouriting sessions now for easy access.

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I was updating one of my customer’s environment to vCenter 8.0 Update 3a today and was moving from the old vSphere Update Manager Baselines over to image based updating via vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), but the compliance check stopped at 30% for some reason.

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