VAIO Update and Incoming Projects

Recently I’ve restored an old Sony VAIO UX380N and got it to run Xubuntu Linux after replacing some components. Too bad replacement batteries and such are hard to come by these days…I’ll have to find a good use case for this when I move…

Due to schoolwork and such, burning through all my personal projects in the pipeline is pushed to when I have free time. More projects will be incoming! I may be building some little Dat Network nodes or a Miner in the future…Stay tuned!

College Woes and a Quick Update

Now that I’ve started yet another semester of college, it seems that I have vast amounts of homework related to core classes that have been forced upon my schedule at the last minute. In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be working on the following things:

• Licensing the unRAID server

• Installing Xen on the “bigboi” server

• Hosting some applications and game servers in LXC containers to check out how they’re useful

• Hosting our Senior Design capstone project in a vm, though I’ve never played with Xen so I might go down a rabbit hole

• Building Kodi boxes, retro consoles etc with the remaining Raspberry Pis I have, in order to reduce the number of projects I have

• Prepare for moving back to the West Coast in June

That’s all for now! This is a quick update!

Things in Motion

Learning a lot more these days about technologies such as Qubes, Terraform and setting up a Kickstart file for a minimal CentOS install to throw down an OpenStack-based “homelab” virtual lab that future professors might use to help their students learn…but that will get some work as a capstone project later on.

In my free time I finally got the unRAID server running as a storage provider and scraping host…so I might have more to report on the scraper project soon as I delete my social media more and more, as well as hold onto Youtube media that might be uploaded to a decentralized source now as peoples’ channels get shut down. Also might begin archiving some projects in the #FOSS world.

Also I’ve been doing work on just learning OpenStack since there seem to be quite a few moving parts that I should learn bit by bit before tackling an entire sandbox for it head-on. I’m still moving at the pace I learned while out West and am thankful for what I learned in Silicon Valley- I will return…

Some developments

Recently I've mainly been focusing on some open source projects I've been helping my friends out with, working on dashboarding and on-call automation at a Tesla internship and attempting to finish Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild.

I gotta say, as much as I love Nintendo games, damn that one is a bit more brutal than previous iterations! Previously, you could actually manage to live for a while in Zelda games...now it's as if Nintendo partnered with From Software...Nonetheless, onward with more tech blather.

I've recently been working on more self-hosted things. I'm likely going to host my own Sandstorm instance with Rocket.Chat and some other apps on there when I get back home in August from California. The Factorio Ansible playbooks that I somewhat talked about here on another page are still in development- Ansible can further my understanding of how automation can be used in both personal and professional environments. I'm also looking into Terraform to see how, upon return to the midwest and my homelab, I can map out my infrastructure for future reference.

Outside of homework and open source projects, those playbooks and tools I covered...I haven't done much outside of work at Tesla. I'll update this again when I get time...usually once a month.

Work Work Work!

Hello again all. It's been quite a while since I've updated this space. I've been working on quite a few things for Tesla now that I'm out here working for them. I got an extension on my original contract to work out here and now I'll be out here till August! Woo hoo!

I've worked on lots of things out here so far, from working on Model 3 infrastructure in the factory, to keeping sites up, to learning Ansible for mass provisioning and integrating it with Jenkins for version control, to learning how to setup a dashboard when a team has no clients or anything to plug into other than networking switches at multiple locations. Learning a lot of varied tools that helpdesk, sysadmin and DevOps have all used in the past while here!

Here's to looking forward to the future and the side projects I can work on when I get home!