Posts

This is the second post on AWS IAM, and I’ll be talking about Roles, IAM Security Tools, and ending with some best practices. Roles We saw in the last post that you can assign policies to user accounts to allow/deny certain actions within your AWS account. But what if you wanted a third party to perform some kind of action on your account? What about an automated system? Is there any way to limit their access, or do they just get full carte blanche access to your entire account? ...

I have a modest homelab, only a few hundred gigabytes of content that doesn’t change often. Most of the content is not really that important, but I back it up anyways because, hey, storage costs are pretty low. I use BackBlaze B2, which is about $6/TB, which I am easily under. So you’ll image my surprise when my February bill came from BackBlaze, and it was for $103.91. Yup, I went from spending about $2.50, to over one hundred dollars in about a month. How? ...

I recently became a AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner! The exam was relatively simple, it primarily involved understanding what all of AWS’s services do at a very high level. However, it doesn’t really prepare you to use the services, so I am continuing down the Solutions Architect Path with the Solutions Architect Associate certification! I found a highly rated course on Udemy called “Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate 2026” produced by Stéphane Maarek. In an effort to show my competency, retain the information myself, and perhaps even teach you a thing or two, I’ll be producing some journal-style blog posts showcasing what I have learned. ...

Welp, I’m ready to start writing my backup script! I ended up using Python, mostly because I feel more comfortable using it. I considered Bash, and perhaps in the future I will convert the process to Bash. But as I said, I am more comfortable in Python, and, at least for now, think Python could be better. We shall see. Bash may be more ubiquitous, but I’m not planning on ever running this on any exotic hardware, so Python is a reasonable requirment. ...

Backups are like oral hygiene. Everyone knows they’re important and most people are doing something, but very few people are actually putting in the effort to do it completely. They’ve always been on my TODO list, but other things have always caught my attention and distracted me from this all-important endeavor. Plus, I was honestly kinda scared to dive into the proper way of doing Docker Volume and database backups; everything is working fine for now, why change it? ...

I recently followed a tutorial put out by TechnoTim called “PostgreSQL Clustering the Hard Way”. It is a fantastic video, he does a good job of walking you step by step though the instructions all while explaining what each thing is doing and what each line of configuration means. After following his tutorial and having my own HA PostgreSQL cluster, I wondered if I could do the same with some webservers. Certainly it should be easy, right? After all, a simple webservers should be the easiest thing to configure because they’ve been around as long as the internet has. ...

This post was originally posted on a Wordpress blog that I had and forgot about. It is being posted here for completeness of my homelab journey. It was originally posted in the summer of 2024. This is the first in a series of articles detailing my 2024 homelab update. I have been running my current homelab off an old 2013 or 2015 iMac I got from my grandfather, as well as a repurposed gaming PC I built in 2020. The iMac has been my application server (using Docker and Docker Compose to manage the applications), and the gaming PC has been my storage server, running TrueNAS CORE, which you may know is FreeBSD based. Nothing wrong with FreeBSD per se, but I am rather partial to Debian, so when I saw that TrueNAS SCALE was Debian-based, I knew I wanted to switch. Additionally, the 8GB of the iMac was starting to be a limiting factor, and I also wanted to do things “more correctly” like using a hypervisor, Kubernetes, and more Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). ...

This post was originally posted on a Wordpress blog that I had and forgot about. It is being posted here for completeness of my homelab journey. It was originally posted in early 2023. I’ve decided to layout what my homelab looks like now because this summer I hope to change some things. Storage My current storage server is one that started life as a gaming computer that I built back in 2020. I had gotten a wild itch to build a computer (my first ever build), that admittedly I didn’t really plan much out. I also didn’t really factor in the fact that I am not a gamer. So after I built it I toyed around with Cities:Skylines, Stardew Valley, and other such games, but the computer largely sat unused (or at least under-used). ...

Welcome to my site! Here I will be talking about the things that interest me. The purposes of this site are three-fold: Information archive for myself. I like to homelab and selfhost, and sometimes I forget the things that I have done, or how I did them. Ths site will be a reposatory of all my adventures Information archive for others. The internet is a tremendous invention, allowing the dispursal of information accross the globe nearly instantaniously. I hope that at least some of these posts will be helpful to someone in some way. Evidence for future employers: A resume can only say so much. I hope that this website serves as proof of what I can do to anyone who hapens to be looking. As of the writing, this site is still very new and I am still learning all the options for Hugo and PaperMod (the framework and theme, respectively, that this blog runs off of). ...