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Field notes

Notes on technology, culture and the home lab. Quality over quantity — posted only when there's something genuinely worth adding, not on a schedule.

Oct 2025 OVH weird Grub / EFI Setup Issues - Proxmox Fixing boot problems on OVH after a Proxmox 8-to-9 upgrade, down to OVH's odd EFI setup. tech Aug 2025 Proxmox LE - Azure DNS Keeping up with Microsoft's shifting Azure API tokens for Let's Encrypt DNS challenges on Proxmox. tech May 2025 Future FoundHERs Podcast On being the first male guest on the Future FoundHERs podcast. culture Apr 2025 NanoKVM Remote Firmware Upgrade Remotely upgrading the firmware across a small fleet of NanoKVM lites. tech Mar 2025 Proxmox SyS / OVH & Grub Issue A script to resync grub before reboot on OVH's weirdly partitioned Proxmox boxes. tech Mar 2025 Unicorn Chef Cooking and talking infosec as the first UK guest on the Unicorn Chef podcast. culture Aug 2024 Ubuntu 24 LTS - Unifi Mongo Update to 7.0 Getting UniFi onto MongoDB 7.0 on Ubuntu 24 LTS, finally off the ancient 3.6. tech Nov 2023 Go Bag... What's in my travel go-bag: a GL.iNet router, USB drive and Firestick, all in one case. tech Aug 2023 Anisble My working notes for an Ansible runbook that patches all my Linux boxes from one place. tech Apr 2023 Extending a disk - Update An easier disk-extension workflow using growpart, replacing my older fdisk dance. tech Feb 2023 It's a lab in a box Building a fully mobile home lab into a flight case, mostly because it would be cool. tech Jan 2023 Intel 5xxx and Proxmox A quick fix for getting Proxmox happy on Intel 5xxx-series hardware (a Beelink U59 Pro). tech Jan 2023 Replacing ZFS Drive Proactively replacing an ageing ZFS drive before it could fail, with a borrowed reference doc. tech Nov 2022 Canary Light & Power Cuts Using a Canary smart light to ride out the home lab's slow reboot after a power cut. tech Oct 2022 Postfix From Rewrite Rewriting the From address in Postfix using libsasl2 and a sender canonical map. tech Oct 2022 Check_RSS A small check_rss.py plugin to pull RSS feeds into your monitoring platform, revived for openITCOCKPIT. tech Jun 2022 Digital Portfolio Office Why we stood up a Digital Portfolio Office, and the delivery problem it was there to solve. culture Jun 2022 Yummy, yummy Pis - June 2022 Update A running log of the Raspberry Pis in service around the house, June 2022 edition. tech Mar 2022 Proxmox Nagios Monitoring Comprehensive local and remote Proxmox monitoring with the check_pve.rb script, archived here. tech Feb 2022 Proxmox P2V Migration A side-project walkthrough of migrating a physical Windows server onto Proxmox. tech Nov 2021 Backing up a Pi (with USB HDD) A simple, repeatable way to back up a Raspberry Pi to an attached USB disk. tech Oct 2021 ZFS Expand with new disk Replacing an old drive and expanding the ZFS pool onto a larger disk. tech Sept 2021 Podcast - The Bot Cast Talking public-sector digital transformation and the pandemic on The Bot Cast. culture Aug 2021 Hyper-v to Proxmox A word- and code-heavy walkthrough of migrating a Gen-2 Hyper-V VM to Proxmox. tech Aug 2021 Guest Blog - Respect in Security A guest blog for the Respect in Security pledge, on calling out bad behaviour in the industry. culture May 2021 Pi Rack & Pi KVM Rack-mounting a pair of Raspberry Pis and tidying the lab with Pi-KVM. tech Feb 2021 A Couple of PDFs... A couple of external write-ups I leaned on for specific issues, kept here in case they ever vanish. tech Jan 2021 SES - SNS -Lamdba - Dynamodb - Alllll the AWS After a compromise abused my SES, wiring up SNS, Lambda and DynamoDB to stay on top of it. tech Jan 2021 Emergency Pi Zero Turning a Pi Zero into a tiny drop-in device for emergency remote access to a site. tech Dec 2020 Migrations & Pi KVM Moving my home server from an HP Microserver to a Lenovo P500, with Pi-KVM for remote control. tech Nov 2020 Cloudkey 2+ Let's Encrypt & Backups DNS-based Let's Encrypt certificates and off-controller backups on a UniFi CloudKey 2+. tech Sept 2020 Lego Rack Server The BrickLink parts list for building a rack-mounted Lego server, borrowed from LinkedIn. tech Jul 2020 Flic HTTP request with Authentication Getting Flic's HTTP request action to work against an endpoint that needs authentication. tech Jul 2020 Proxmox Community Updates Swapping the Proxmox enterprise repo for the no-subscription one to get community updates. tech Jul 2020 Shelly HTTP Commands A reference of HTTP commands for controlling Shelly devices, including password-protected ones. tech Jul 2020 OPNsense + NextCloud Backup - Windows Client Issue Why a colon in OPNsense backup filenames breaks the Windows NextCloud client, and the fix. tech Jul 2020 Public Sector Podcast My turn on The Public Sector Pod, talking digital transformation in government. culture Dec 2019 Duo ByPass Adding a Duo 2FA bypass for scripts and automated logins via the SSHD PAM config. tech Aug 2019 Image Hosting URL Options PictShare URL modifiers for resizing, rotating, converting and filtering self-hosted images. tech Feb 2019 Nagios Core Upgrade Upgrading Nagios Core from source on Ubuntu, across several releases. tech Oct 2018 Local Gov Strategy Forum Going in resigned and coming out pleasantly surprised: notes from a local-gov strategy forum. culture Aug 2018 RDP Cert (Windows 7) Installing a commercial CA certificate for Remote Desktop on Windows 7. tech Jul 2018 Extend a partition and LVM with Ubuntu 16.04 Step-by-step partition and LVM extension on Ubuntu 16.04 after adding disk. tech Jun 2018 Expand a hard disk with LVM Growing a VM's disk and extending the LVM volume to use the new space. tech Jun 2018 Unifi Video Mongodb remove Manually removing a stuck UniFi camera straight from the controller's MongoDB. tech May 2018 I admire.... The people I actually follow and learn from, worth more than most leadership courses. culture May 2018 Chelmsford - The Digital Journey So Far My piece for Public Sector Executive (Apr/May 2018) on Chelmsford's digital journey so far. culture Apr 2018 Personality Profiles Do Myers-Briggs and Facet5 actually help a functional team? A sceptic's take. culture Mar 2018 Outcome Based Delivery Why I can't stand presenteeism, and the case for judging teams on outcomes instead. culture Feb 2018 OPNSense & Duo The OPNsense LDAP setting that stops Duo from seeing the same user twice. tech Feb 2018 OPNSense & OVH/SyS Adding OVH/SoYouStart gateways and failover IPs in OPNsense, much simpler than pfSense. tech Jan 2018 Let's Encrypt - Webroot The one-line certbot webroot command I never want to look up again. tech Dec 2017 Monitoring ESXi with Nagios Getting solid ESXi visibility in Nagios using box293_check_vmware and check_esxi_hardware.py. tech Dec 2017 Patching a stand alone ESXi Host Applying cumulative ESXi patches to a standalone HP host. tech Dec 2017 Hyper-V & OVH - Network PowerShell notes for creating an external Hyper-V switch on an OVH dedicated server. tech Dec 2017 Hyper-V & OVH - Workgroup Configuring remote management between a workgroup Hyper-V host and its managing client on OVH. tech Nov 2017 Hyper-v workgroup A quick cmdkey trick for authenticating against a workgroup Hyper-V host. tech Jun 2017 OVH and pfSense The pfSense routing commands needed to reach your main OVH IP from an out-of-range interface. tech May 2017 Nagios MySQL Setting up a restricted MySQL user so Nagios can check database availability. tech May 2017 Auto OpenVPN Script Standing up OpenVPN on a fresh VPS, and the iptables NAT rule that fixed my routing. tech May 2017 Cert for ESXi Generating and installing a proper certificate request for an ESXi 6.0 host. tech May 2017 Configure Windows Remote Desktop to use TLS with StartSSL Securing Windows Remote Desktop with a TLS certificate, generating the CSR from a Linux box. tech May 2017 OVH Gateway for Failover IPs Making sense of OVH's unusual failover-IP gateway scheme behind a pfSense firewall. tech May 2017 Z-Push with MXRoute A challenge to get ActiveSync working for free, using Z-Push with MXroute. tech Mar 2017 HP Proliant Poster A handy reference link to HP's ProLiant generation-naming poster. tech Mar 2017 Pre March 2017 Notes An archive of assorted older notes carried over from before March 2017. tech