Welcome! My goal for this blog is to serve as both a form of forced self-documentation for my homelab progress over time, as well as provide tutorials and knowledge to those who may stumble across it. If you’d like to know a little more about me, check out my about page.
Rundeck Installation Tips
Installation Options In this post, I’m going to cover 2 methods for installing and configuring Rundeck: Docker installation, and Local installation. During the process of my initial Docker installation, I was able to get Rundeck in a “working” state, (functioning projects/jobs/commands/nodes, etc.), at least until I wanted to use the Ansible plugin. Rundeck with Ansible integration requires Ansible to be installed on the same “server”, so if we have Rundeck in a container, we would need Ansible to be installed within that container....
Ansible Unattended With SSH Passphrases
SSH Key Auth While I am pretty new to the realm of SSH and Ansible, I learned early on that SSH key authentication is the gold standard for security and practicality. Ideally, you also want a passphrase on your key. This doesn’t negate the need to rotate your keys or change them upon a compromising event, but it does add an extra layer of security, i.e. if a bad actor gained access to your private key, they would still need your passphrase in order to use it....
SWAG Reverse Proxy, handling multiple domains across multiple servers
Recently I decided I wanted to start hosting a blog. If you’re reading this post, I was successful in that endeavor. While working out the details, I decided for sure that I wanted it to be a self-hosted operation. I quickly fell down the rabbit hole of researching various blogging platforms and static site generators. TL;DR This is essentially what I want: walnuthomelab.com -> server A (LAN) service.walnuthomelab.com -> server A (LAN) blog....
Using Ansible to deploy your Fortigate certificates
So if we’re following the diagram path from my previous post, the first step in the chain is the hand-off of the WAN connection from my ATT gateway to my Fortigate firewall. That being said, I’ll focus a few posts on that hand-off and some other helpful things I use to manage my Fortigate. Disclaimer: I’m not a hyper-experienced graybeard when it comes to FortiOS, Fortigate devices, or Ansible. I just managed to get this working for my use-case and want the information to be out there if anyone else runs into the same problems I did...
The Network: Humble Beginnings
The Infra After the dense stream of consciousness that was my last post, I’d like to spend the next few posts giving you a brief overview of the elements that make up my current homelab. Seeing as there is a lot to cover from each of those elements, I’ll try to break the overview into several more manageable chunks instead of a single all-encompassing wall of text. To start us off, here’s a refresher on the logical diagram of my lab:...