More than six months ago, I wrote about planning and designing our future house. Fast forward to today, about nine months later, we see plenty of progress. Here’s an update, hoping that someone reading these later might find helpful information… Read More »Building a house: Construction and challenges
Recently, I had a request from a customer. They have a design where two virtual machines are needed in Azure. One is aimed to be used in a classic “DMZ-style” approach, where select endpoints are exposed for select external users… Read More »Replicating files between two Azure Virtual Machines: Considerations and options
One year ago, I wrote about my progress working out at the gym for a year. It’s now been two years, and I’ve been consistently training with a similar approach. I wanted to look back to see how things have… Read More »A look back: Two years of working out at the gym
A few months ago, I wrote Part 1 of this series, documenting how I began building a homelab. I’ve progressed further with my project by adding the 4U dedicated server, the Raspberry Pi cluster, and cleaning everything up. The setup… Read More »Building a homelab – finalizing the setup (Part 2)
This one is easy. If you block and deny all traffic in your firewall, you cannot access any Azure services. Someone asked me this question a few months ago, and I wanted to test what happens and how a company… Read More »Can you access Microsoft Azure if your firewall is blocking all traffic?
Last week, Windows 365 became available as part of Microsoft 365. It’s a “cloud PC” service – essentially providing a dedicated workstation (as a virtual machine) in Microsoft 365 for a fixed monthly fee. I activated the trial as I… Read More »A look at Windows 365 – the Cloud PC service
On most devices that I frequently use, I use a solution to block excessive ads. Firefox on mobile and desktop is super easy as the same ad blocking extensions work on both. Many of my friends have been praising Pi-Hole… Read More »Goodbye telemetry and ads – running Pi-Hole in a home network
For years, I’ve used the Logitech BRIO 4K as my primary webcam at home. I use it for Windows Hello to unlock my PC, and I use it for each meeting. It’s pretty great – but it’s also just a… Read More »Using a DSLR as a webcam
Today, I’m building a locally hosted (“On-Premises,” if you will) Kubernetes cluster that runs on three Raspberry Pi 4 devices. The goal is to get Kubernetes working and being able to deploy WordPress and MySQL on the cluster. But why?… Read More »Building a Kubernetes cluster using Raspberry Pi 4
Does anyone use the term ‘snail mail’ anymore? Anyway, I still use it to refer to regular posts and mail I seem to be getting each day through my door. We have a sticker on the door to avoid getting… Read More »Building a mailbox sensor solution using Raspberry Pi and a wireless sensor
This week I’ve been working with a set of Linux virtual machines hosted in Azure. They are all Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, so relatively new – but not the latest release (which at the time of writing this is 21.04). Once… Read More »Securing your Linux VMs in Azure with Azure Disk Encryption
This is one of the more enjoyable projects I’ve done recently during my spare time. I run Azure Sentinel in all of my Azure environments – it’s a SIEM solution, which stands for Security Information and Event Management. In essence,… Read More »Building an integration between Azure Sentinel and Unifi infrastructure for a proper SIEM solution
At home, I’ve had many network devices, a varying number of servers, and other gear running for a few decades. After each move, I get rid of a lot of the stuff that I don’t need. Then, over time my… Read More »Building a homelab – moving to rack-mounted gear, and refreshing the internal network (Part 1)
I’m building a new home network, which for me means upgrading certain hardware, and acquiring new hardware over time. The far-reaching plan is to build a solid 10 Gigabit Ethernet-based network, with guest WiFi, proper VLANs, and the ability to… Read More »Review: Ubiquiti Networks’ Unifi Dream Machine Pro (UDM-Pro) in a home network
At home, I run a Plex media server. I’ve added a TV receiver to the setup to have a real DVR that I can control remotely. It’s great! Here’s how it looks in Plex when I want to record all… Read More »Building an integration for Plex with Azure API Management
I’ve spent a considerable time during my career automating and scripting things. I started with plain old MS-DOS .BAT files moved to Unix shell scripts and evolved via Perl to a collection of “hey, let’s use awk/sed/grep/find” VBScript. Eventually, I… Read More »An in-depth look at Microsoft Power Automate Desktop and building Robotic Process Automations
Over two years ago, I migrated to 1Password to store and manage all my passwords. Since then, I migrated back to KeePass again – as 1Password was quite cumbersome to use for our family’s needs. Too many technical issues, too… Read More »Building a self-hosted secure password management with Bitwarden and Docker
At home, I run most of my network based on the Ubiquiti Networks’ Unifi products. I’ve previously written a few times about different solutions that rely on these products, such as expanding my wireless network with a Mesh solution. Since… Read More »Replacing an Unifi Cloud Key (Gen 1) with a Docker container-based self-hosted solution
Today I’m writing about something fairly esoteric – an open-source project called Teslamate and how to set it up so that I can access it securely. Even if you don’t have plans to deploy Teslamate, I feel it’s still useful… Read More »Building secure access to Teslamate using Azure
My home network is a regular LAN, built mostly with Unifi devices using 1 Gigabit Ethernet. I’ve extended the wifi, made a VPN to the cloud, played around with different devices within the network, and generally, I’ve been pleased with… Read More »Upgrading my home office network to 10 Gigabit Ethernet speeds – one step at a time