sysadmin - lesser daemon

26

Apr

The Boring Stuff Is Worth It

I've spent the last few weeks setting up a Plex server on a Synology NAS drive and I have finally gotten it working reasonably well. I haven't set up the arr suite or whatever yet because I can really only tolerate spending so much of my free time debugging docker containers but I'll get there. This was a long and mostly tedious process, but now I have a self-hosted media library I can access anywhere through Plex.

I struggle a lot with making myself do stuff like this. If I'm not working on a project obsessively (which I've been trying

2 min read

09

Apr

Provisioning a Red Hat VirtualBox VM With Vagrant

In what I hope will be the last entry in the "Brent learns the basics of VM provisioning" series, I finally moved to using Hashicorp's Vagrant yesterday. I'm glad I took the time to mess around in VirtualBox itself first - I always like understanding what I'm working with before I move to abstractions - but Vagrant makes it significantly easier. Vagrant sets up SSH in your VM by default, which is a nice time-saver, and generally makes the process of automating VM setup quick and easy. Behold:

1) Install Vagrant & VirtualBox.

2) In your project folder, add the

1 min read

08

Apr

Setting Up Port Forwarding on a VirtualBox RedHat VM With A NAT Network Adapter

OK, quickly discovered that I was less brilliant than I thought yesterday. It appears that for the functionality I wanted (both the ability to SSH into the VM and to port forward from my local machine to an application running on the VM) I need to use a NAT and not a bridge network.

I spent a while struggling with this and discovered that to assign your VM to the standard 10.0.2.* range and successfully connect to the internet, a NAT drive should be your first network adapter. I'd initially had a bridge network as Adapter 1 and

3 min read

18

Sep

Setting Up TiddlyWiki on a Remote Server with Systemd & Nginx

TiddlyWiki is a cool tool, but if you, like me, are ~~insane~~ interested in getting it set up on the cloud, it can be a bit of a hassle. Here's a quick set of instructions to get it to run automatically as a service on a Linux server - I used a Hetzner Ubuntu machine.

Install TiddlyWiki and create a server:

npm install -g tiddlywiki

tiddlywiki {server name} --init server

Create a systemctl file for Tiddlywiki, e.g. etc/systemd/system/tiddlywiki.service

Add the following for a barebones systemd service:

[Unit]
Description=TiddlyWiki Server
After=network.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

2 min read