One of the (few) things I liked about using Windows in the lab was being able to use bginfo to show basic host information as the background.

For my lab machines, I like being able to see basic information, without a resource-heavy application doing the display.

Conky meets that need.

Highly configurable, with a lot of …

I have a few virtual machine deployed on in my home lab, and my general OS of choice is Ubuntu Mate.

Not as barebones basic as XFCE4, and not as resource-intensive as Gnome3 or KDE.

One of the first things I do after rolling out a virtual machine is to disable the screensaver and lock screen on any OS.

On Ubuntu Mate, …

One of the things I always like about using VMWare's ESXi servers was the ability to access the console of the virtual machine (VM).

This ability also exists when using Linux KVM and Linux VMs, and is pretty simple to set up.

Bonus points after a small config change, it's much more usable.

Enable the console from …

Using minikube is a great way to learn Kubernetes, without all of the overhead/complexity of installing a full fledged Kubernetes deployment.

In a nutshell, minikube is local Kubernetes.

As Kubernetes/minikube are container orchestration tools, you need something to run the 'pods'.

For minikube, this can be Docker, …

I have a Pi-hole Docker container running on my NAS, but DNS functionality is too important to have a single point of failure.

If something were to happen to my NAS, my home network would have no DNS resolution, which brings the network to it's knees.

I had been using a Raspberry Pi as my second DNS server, running …

Upgrading Pi-hole is easy:

pihole -up

However, this doesn't work if you're running a Docker container.

docker exec -it pihole pihole -up
Function not supported in Docker images

To get Pi-hole Docker container upgraded, you have to force Docker to pull the latest Pi-hole version and redeploy the container.

docker pull …