Recent content on Virtual to the Core
When I first built out DNS for my home lab, I did what most people do: I spun up two Ubuntu VMs, installed BIND 9, and put Webmin on top so I could manage zones and records comfortably through a GUI instead of hand-editing zone files over SSH. It worked. For a while. My lab simulates a Cloud Service Provider environment — multiple network segments, a split-DNS setup, several internal domains, four…
In the last few months I’ve worked to deeply understand Encryption, how it works, how KMS and KMIP work, and I also ended up writing two deep technical blog posts you can read here: Reviving a dead open source project: fixing PyKMIP for modern Veeam integration Deploy automatically your own free KMS with PyKMIP
A few years ago I started to use Let’s Encrypt to automate the certificate creation and their renewals for many of my systems, mainly my lab used for Veeam Cloud Connect . The challenge method I used was based on the interaction with AWS Route53 DNS services; since I lately moved my domain virtualtothecore.com to Cloudflare, I had to modify my scripts to use this new system, and I took the…
After years using mainly VMware vSphere, I started lately to learn new hypervisors. One of the most interesting solutions for Service Provider is Openstack, so I tried to build a test machine in my lab to play with it. There are many ways to install Openstack, for my lab I wanted something easy to be built and used, so I opted for a AIO (All-In-One) system. I had to tweak the information I found…
In my previous post , I explained why PyKMIP is a perfect choice for a homelab KMS server, and I told the story of the adventure I embarked on to fix its old and broken code. Now, with my new forked and functional version ready, it’s time to deploy it in my lab — fully automated with Terraform.
When I started looking for a free, self-hosted KMIP server to use in my homelab, PyKMIP seemed like the obvious choice. It is the only open source Python implementation of the KMIP protocol, it has been around for years, and it has a reasonable amount of documentation. What could go wrong? As it turns out, quite a lot.
One of the most common ways to subscribe to blogs like mine is to use RSS feeds. Thanks to this technology people can receive automatically in their preferred RSS reader any new post I create. Over the years I’ve noticed that several users did it, so while I was migrating from Wordpress to Hugo I didn’t want to break this feature.
With the introduction of Veeam Backup and Replication v13, Veeam Powershell has become available for Linux environments, initially only for Rocky Linux 9 and RHEL 9.6. In my laptop I run Linux via a WSL instance that is based on Ubuntu 24.04. So I added a new WSL instance and then I installed on it the needed software.
While I was migrating this website from Wordpress to Hugo, I immediately started to think how to improve its usage, in terms of both new content creation and publishing. Hugo can create new posts following a template, so that many parameters are already configured. I wanted to explore this option and see what I could do with it. Here’s what I found.
In my previous post I’ve explained my migration from Wordpress to Hugo. My main focus was around building the new site, configuring the framework and importing the old posts. But what happens in the background each time I publish a new post? Let’s find it out in this post.
Migrating to Hugo often brings a common frustration: your image links, perfectly valid for the generated site, appear as broken icons in local Markdown editors like VS Code and Obsidian. This happens because Hugo’s internal linking ( /images/my-image.png ) refers to its static directory as the web root, while your file system and editors typically look for images relative to the Markdown…
In the last years I thought multiple times about switching from Wordpress to something easier to use and manage, but I never seriously looked into it because of a mix of lazyness and fear to break my blog after so many years (I just checked, my first blog post is from November 2008, almost 20 years!!!!). Then, some days ago I read this blog post from my colleague Tim Smith , and I read for the…
Back in 2023, I automated my home lab starting with vSphere templates. I used Packer to get the job done, a process I originally documented in this blog post . It took me a few weeks of ‘after-hours’ tinkering to get everything right, and for a long time, that setup served me well. However, as Ubuntu 22.04 aged, my ‘automated’ templates became obsolete. I found myself…
In my homelab I historically used a couple of MS Windows Server machines to run DNS and authentication services. They did their job perfectly, but I realized that lately no single machine in my network was joined to their Active Directory domain, and so basically I was using them as just DNS servers. To simplify my lab I decided to switch them to two Linux servers, using Bind as the dns service…
At the beginning of 2025, Cloudflare announced a new solution to allow the connection via browser to Windows RDP servers not exposed over the Internet in a totally secure way. Since Windows NT4 RDP has been the way to interact with Windows servers, but it’s always been an unsecure protocol. Exposing it directly over the Internet is historically a huge risk, and the only possible solution is…