Infrastructure Automation ⁽¹⁰⁾

This article is the third in a series on building an Infrastructure Architecture system. The previous two articles discussed the conceptual case for building such a system and explored functions and relationships in a High-Level design. This article, the first of many Low-Level designs, will…

The article shares a simple way of backing up multiple Proxmox VE hosts using a single script. The Proxmox VE host backup gap Proxmox VE lacks an official way of backing up hosts. To address, some commentators suggest scripts to backup individual Proxmox VE hosts,…

Here is a simple snippet for timing file system performance. I wrote this as part of a script to detect an infrequent but recurrent error mode on a NAS that causes performance degradation. I run the script hourly from a Linux host with a CIFS…

Here is a technique to permanently enable SSH access on ESXi hosts. VMWare warns against leaving SSH access enabled on production servers due to security concerns. However, in my homelab this is an acceptable risk. Using the VMWare Web Interface, do Host > Services >…

Connections to cloud-hosted servers are typically secured using an RSA Private Key rather than password. If you have the key saved to a file on a local machine, here is how to use it with SSH, Scp, Rsync and Ansible To use SSH to perform…

The free license option for VMWare ESXi lacks the backup APIs enabled by a vSphere license. Here is a simple script that I use instead to backup my guest VMs on my VMWare ESXi running on a Raspberry Pi 4. The script assumes: Use SSH,…

In the first article in this series we discussed the Conceptual Design for an Infrastructure Architecture System. In this article we will extend upon the ideas discussed previously to create a High-Level design for such a system. The purpose of this High-Level Design is to…

This article is the first in a series that discusses the design, implementation and use of a free Infrastructure Architecture system to monitor, improve and automate your infrastructure. It records my experiences of building such systems for various clients. The aim of my Infrastructure Architecture…

Ventoy is a simple but effective tool that enables multiple bootable ISOs to coexist on a single USB Pendrive. It is convenient and expedient solution to booting hardware using a range of different operating systems. The problems with bootable Pendrives You are probably familiar with…

Presence indication in Teams, Skype for Business and other IM clients is really useful, especially when working remotely. However, when we are on the phone, in a meeting, reading, or waiting for a lengthy script to run then lack of keyboard or mouse activity can…