RSSAmplifier

Blog

Jon Archer

Recent content on Jon Archer

jonarcher.infoRSS feed ↗53 posts

Latest posts

Fully Automated Kubernetes Cluster: Proxmox, Talos, OpenTofu and Forgejo

I’ve been running a homelab Kubernetes cluster for a while now, and kept meaning to write up how it’s all wired together. This is an overview of what will become a series of posts. I’ll be looking to cover each area of the setup, building it up as we go, including code. 
 The main tools I’ve used in this build are Proxmox as a hypervisor running the VMs that make up the…

Cycling to Carnforth via the Trough of Bowland

A cycling journey to Carnforth via the scenic Trough of Bowland, one of Lancashire’s most beautiful routes.

2024 Cycling Recap

A scenic summer evening ride along the converted railway paths from Bury to Rawtenstall, taking in the beautiful Kirklees and Irwell trails.

Cycling the Old Railway Lines: Bury to Rawtenstall

A scenic summer evening ride along the converted railway paths from Bury to Rawtenstall, taking in the beautiful Kirklees and Irwell trails.

Cycling Bolton Abbey to Burnsall: An Impromptu Adventure in the Yorkshire Dales

When plans change unexpectedly, sometimes the best adventures emerge - a beautiful cycling journey through the Yorkshire Dales from Bolton Abbey to Burnsall.

Terraforming Serverless

In my day job recently I’ve been rewriting AWS deployment infrastructure-as-code taking Serverless-Framework and raw Cloudformation transforming it into Terraform.

Blogging With Best Intentions

I’ve always set out with the best intentions for this site, to regularly write posts about things I’m up to, found out or whatever.

GoingOffGrid Pt2

The day after the Tesla PowerWall install and I’ve configured the device in Home Assistant with some rudimentary additions to existing dashboards.

GoingOffGrid

Today’s the day After being on the waiting list for some time, my PowerWall 2 + Gateway installation is finally happening today.

I'm certified, AWS certified that is.

I’m proud to announce that I sat my AWS Security Speciality Certification exam yesterday and passed.

New Site Part 3

Since I setup the new version of this blog using Hugo, hosted on Cloudfront, I put together a Grafana instance to monitor traffic hitting the CDN.

New Site - Part 2

Just a few days ago I wrote about renewing this site due to wanting to get rid of my hosted VM.

New Blog site

It’s been a while since I posted a new blog post, but I’ve recently decided to scale down my hosting (VM) in favour of attempting to make content a…

Recipe: Garlic & Lemon Marinade for Chicken

First off, happy new year to everyone

Aquaponics and growing update, late summer.

Hi all, been a while since I’ve posted anything, I’ve recently picked up myself a new camera.

Home Brewing Beer with Tech

Many moons ago, I used to brew my own beer.

Sensoring Aquaponics

As part of my interest in aquaponics I’ve always intended to enable some kind of electronic monitoring, various thoughts on what to monitor and how have been in my head for a while.

Aquaponics update

Thought I’d post a quick progress report on the aquaponics setup as the build pretty much complete and the growing has commenced.

My foray into aquaponics

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were sharing YouTube videos around water harvesting, hydro electricity generation and the like.

Maplins weather station fun

weather station control unit weather station sensor pole A while ago I bought one of the Maplins weather stations, just for fun really no plans with it.

Ensure systemd services restart on failure

I wrote a post a while ago covering the use of Monit to monitor services running and the use case I covered was to ensure these services restarted on failure.

Hardening SSH with OTP for 2 factor authentication

Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while is look into the possibility of using 2 factor authentication, or 2FA, with SSH connections.

Etckeeper - config version control

A valuable tool I have been using for many years is etckeeper, it works by essentially turning your /etc directory into a git repository.

SSH known hosts verification failure one liner

WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED

Getting Fedora 21 on the Raspberry Pi 2

The recent release of the Raspberry Pi 2 uses a newer version of the ARM architecture spec, the ARM Cortex-A7 uses ARMv7 whereas the previous model ARM11 uses ARMv6.

Monit - monitor your processes and services simply

Monit is an application I’ve been meaning to setup for a while, I was first made aware of it from a chap I had the pleasure of talking to at OggCamp this year, he seemed to use it to the n’th degree to monitor files and services within docker containers to ensure a development environment was as it should be.

Barcamp Manchester

IMG20141018092931

Gluster, CIFS, ZFS - kind of part 2

A while ago I put together a post detailing the installation and configuration of 2 hosts running glusterfs, which was then presented as CIFS based…

Upgrade CentOS 6 to 7 with Upgrade Tools

I decided to try the upgrade process from EL 6 to 7 on the servers I used in my previous blog post “Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and C…”

Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data

This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS.

Raspberry Pi Wildlife Camera

A while ago I built a Raspberry Pi based nature camera, sometimes known as a trail camera.

Installing dig on a CentOS or Red Hat machine

Gone are the days where we install nslookup for DNS resolution testing, the new(ish) kid on the block is dig.

Arduino based Electricity monitor

Over the past 12 months or so I’ve been looking to add various “Smart House” components to my home, rather than do this in the traditional sense of buying something off-the-shelf I’ve been experimenting and building my own.

Import regular kvm image to oVirt or RHEV

I recently replaced a couple of servers within a friends business with an oVirt virtualisation setup, I’m really pleased with the whole configuration which consists of a single engine host and 2 hypervisor nodes, the storage is shared over the 2 hosts with glusterfs.

2013 - A good year

I thought I’d finish off the year with a bit of reflection, overall it’s been a pretty good year in both camps of my life - the geek/tech and the family side.

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 2 LinuxCon Europe 2013

Whoa I’m getting a bit slow here

OggCamp and LinuxCon Europe: Part 1 OggCamp

Although it’s been over a week since I returned from both these events I thought I better put a little something up about them and the experiences …

Light control with MQTT on Arduino

It’s been a while since I stayed up most of the night writing code, mainly down to having a young daughter but also down to the fact I haven’t found anything that needed a late night hack session to produce a result.

New projects: Pi's and Arduinos

Recently I’ve been working on several new projects, all of which use either a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino.

Bletchley Park, Little People, Job Change and broken bones.

So, it’s been a while since I wrote anything on here, mainly because I couldn’t find the time to do so.

New hosting for my blog

After one of my LUG colleagues mentioning about the BigV service from Bytemark I just had to try it.

Why I'm uninstalling Ubuntu

I wouldn’t normally write about this kind of move, but I’m in a position where I feel I have to.

Post Raspberry Jamboree Event

Let me start by saying, Saturday was a fantastic day out - even if I was there as crew not an attendee.

Raspberry Jamboree Event

image

Linux Outlaws Live in Liverpool

lol300

GlusterFS Quickstart Howto on Fedora

Gluster Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora.

rsync with spaces in filenames fun

While I was trying to copy a load of files from one server to another I found a problem I’ve seen time and time again, rsync with filenames that have spaces in them.

Post Virtualisation Talk

Well I finally got there, after a bout of illness causing me to postpone the talk, I finally delivered it last night.

Virtualisation talk

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really.

My contribution to the consultation team/my MP regarding government "adult" filtering

Here’s my two pence worth in the argument against government driven “adult” filtering on the internet I’ve sent a copy to the consultation team via…