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, …

Most computer new computer hardware that will fail quickly, will fail within the first month of usage, if not sooner.

Given that, it's recommended to do a burn-in test for any new computer hardware, including hard drives.

I've been using a disk burn-in test to stress test hard drives as I've been replacing them in my …

Sooner or later, every system will have a drive failure.

ZFS was designed with this in mind.

I noticed in my /var/log/kern.log file error messages about one of the drives in my ZFS pool.

Dec  8 07:11:17 nas kernel: [738110.398391] ata8.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x80000004 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
Dec  8 07:11:17 nas …

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, …

Installing Docker on Ubuntu 20.04

1. Update the apt package index:

sudo apt update

2. Uninstall old version(s):

sudo apt remove docker docker-engine docker.io containerd runc

3. Set up the Docker apt repository:

sudo apt install ca-certificates curl gnupg lsb-release -y

4. Add Docker's GPG key:

curl -fsSL …

When away from home, it's always nice to be able to access devices, servers, services, on my home network.

In addition to accessing my home network's resources, if I route all of my traffic through my home network, I get the added benifit of avoiding insecure wireless networks.

There have been more than a few …