Vincent's Weblog

Setting up a monitoring with prometheus and grafana

Monitoring servers is a crucial element in ensuring smooth operation. In this guide I will be setting up monitoring using Prometheus and a dashboard with Grafana.

grafana dashboard

Requirements

  • A server to use for monitoring, this will house prometheus and grafana
  • A few other servers to monitor.

I will be using Debian …

Setting up a proxmox cluster

Proxmox is a platform that allows you to manage virtual machines trough a web interface. It offers a lot of features like high-availability with automatic failover. This is what I will be setting up in this post

Requirements

A Proxmox cluster requires at least 3 machines for high-availability to work …

CloudInit Basics

CloudInit is a way to initialize virtual machines with some defaults, like user credentials and commands that should be run on startup.

Adding users

I use CloudInit the most to add some users to a VM. You can add multiple users at once too if you add more items

#cloud-config …

Removing shadow from MacOS screenshots

When making a screenshot of a window in macos, with a simple command you can disable/enable the shadow:

#disable
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true ; killall SystemUIServer
#enable
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false ; killall SystemUIServer

I regularly toggle this off when I need to …

Making Proxmox templates

I use proxmox in my homelab to run VM's, but by default you have to install each VM from scratch which can be annoying. Luckily Proxmox has a feature where you can make templates and use Cloud-Init to set them up.

Downloading the base image

First, we need to download …

App defaults

Inspired by hemisphericviews episode 097 I made a list of my default apps.

  • 📨 Mail Client: Apple's mail client, or the fastmail web client on my school laptop.
  • 📮 Mail Server: Fastmail
  • 📝 Notes: Apple's notes.app or a bunch of txt files
  • ✅ To-Do: issues in a git repo (on a private forgejo …

Installing Apache, PHP and MySQL on FreeBSD

In a previous post I went over installing FreeBSD, in this post I will install a "FAMP" stack (FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL and PHP).

Installing Apache

First we will install Apache:

pkg install apache24
sysrc apache24_enable="YES"
service apache24 start
service apache24 status

When we browse to our webpage, we will …

Using jails in FreeBSD

FreeBSD's jails are pretty powerful tools, in this post I will go over how they can be used.

Types of Jails

there are 3 main types of jails:

  • Thick jails
  • Thin Jails
  • Linux Jails

Thick jails are the "traditional" form of jails in FreeBSD, they contain a complete copy of …

UFW Basics

On Debian and Ubuntu systems, the easiest way to configure a firewall is with UFW - The Uncomplicated FireWall.

Installing and enabling

sudo apt install ufw
sudo ufw enable

The default configuration is to deny all incoming traffic

Listing rules

sudo ufw status

Allowing a service

To enable a service, either …

Installing FreeBSD

For a long time, I've noticed "FreeBSD" as an option when spinning up a VM at various cloud providers, but I've never played with it. I decided I should just spin up a VM on my Proxmox machine in my homelab and explore FreeBSD. In this post, I'll go over …