Jonathan

Modernity vs Luxury

A few months ago I bought a 1997 Jaguar XJ8 and I’ve really enjoyed owning it. Owning an old car is interesting so I decided to compare it to the other vehicle I own – a 2015 Ford Mondeo. I wanted to see how top-of-the-range features from almost 25 years ago compare to a regularContinue reading “Modernity vs Luxury”

Using TrueNAS to provide persistent storage for Kubernetes

A while ago I blogged about the possibilities of using Ceph to provide hyperconverged storage for Kubernetes. It works, but I never really liked the solution so I decided to look at dedicated storage solutions for my home lab and a small number of production sites, which would escape the single-node limitation of the MicroK8sContinue reading “Using TrueNAS to provide persistent storage for Kubernetes”

Load-balancing Ingress with MetalLB on MicroK8s

Out of the box, the MicroK8s distribution of ingress-nginx installed as the MicroK8s addon ingress binds to ports 80+443 on the node’s IP address using a hostPort, as we can see here on line 20: This is fine for a single-node deployment, but now MicroK8s supports clustering we need to find a way of load-balancing our Ingress, as a multi-node cluster willContinue reading “Load-balancing Ingress with MetalLB on MicroK8s”

Exposing the Kubernetes Dashboard with an Ingress

With MicroK8s it’s easy to enable the Kubernetes Dashboard by running If you’re running MicroK8s on a local PC or VM, you can access the dashboard with kube-proxy as described in the docs, but if you want to expose it properly then the best way to do this is with an Ingress resource. Firstly, makeContinue reading “Exposing the Kubernetes Dashboard with an Ingress”

Building a hyperconverged Kubernetes cluster with MicroK8s and Ceph

This guide explains how to build a highly-available, hyperconverged Kubernetes cluster using MicroK8s, Ceph and MetalLB on commodity hardware or virtual machines. This could be useful for small production deployments, dev/test clusters, or a nerdy toy. Other guides are available – this one is written from a sysadmin point of view, focusing on stability andContinue reading “Building a hyperconverged Kubernetes cluster with MicroK8s and Ceph”

Canon New FD 35-70mm lenses

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Canon released these two similar lenses as part of their New FD series – both 35-70mm zoom lenses. But what’s the difference between these two lenses, and which is better? First, let’s cover the similarities. These are both compact zoom lenses with the same focal lengths from theContinue reading “Canon New FD 35-70mm lenses”

Rethinking database architecture

Originally published 2015-09-02 on the UoB Unix blog The eduroam wireless network has a reliance on a database for the authorization and accounting parts of AAA (authentication, authorization and accounting – are you who you say you are, what access are you allowed, and what did you do while connected). When we started dabbling with database-backed AAA in 2007Continue reading “Rethinking database architecture”

Service availability monitoring with Nagios and BPI

Originally published 2016-11-21 on the UoB Unix blog Several times, senior management have asked Team Wireless to provide an uptime figure for eduroam. While we do have an awful lot of monitoring of systems and services, it has never been possible to give a single uptime figure because it needs some detailed knowledge to make sense ofContinue reading “Service availability monitoring with Nagios and BPI”

Unlocking features in your mk5 Mondeo with FORScan

The Ford Mondeo mk5 (from 2015 onwards) has a number of useful features that are disabled in the factory but can be unlocked using free software and a USB cable, without any special knowledge. Here’s how. You will need a compatible ELM327 cable. There are loads on eBay but it can’t be just any –Continue reading “Unlocking features in your mk5 Mondeo with FORScan”

Merging SELinux policies

Originally published 2016-08-01 on the UoB Unix blog We make extensive use of SELinux on all our systems. We manage SELinux config and policy with the jfryman/selinux Puppet module, which means we store SELinux policies in plain text .te format – the same format that audit2allow generates them in. One of our SELinux policies that covers permissions for NRPE is a large file. When we generateContinue reading “Merging SELinux policies”