Docker on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

Homelab Update January 2026

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:41:38 +0000

Happy new year homelabbers! I’m cheating a bit and rolling some of the work I got done in December 2025 into this update. I want to say my homelab is pretty boring now it just works which is awesome, only minor tinkering is required these days so I’ve decided to focus on observability for a bit. Knowing when and what things have gone wrong was sorely missing so I’ve finally gotten round to sorting a lot of that out which I’ll detail in a section below.

Chicken/Egg Docker Woes
#

Ever since I migrated away from Ubuntu to Debian I’ve been unable to restart the VM and have all the containers come up again. Even after going through every compose file and making sure that restart: unless-stopped was set. It’s been driving me nuts that this has been happening. Well I finally figure out what was wrong. The hint was that the only container to consistently come back up was fluent-bit. When I migrated to Debian I decided to improve my logging so set up fluent-bit and OpenSearch. I also set the docker logging driver to fluent-bit. Can you spot the issue yet? When docker comes up all the other containers fail over refusing to connect to the fluent-bit socket, pretty obvious now, if docker isn’t running the fluent-bit container isn’t running so how can docker connect to the fluent-bit container? I could keep this sentence recursive. Eventually the fluent-bit container comes up but the rest of them containers have already stopped, restarting them all brings them up fine. I removed the fluent-bit container and ran it as a systemd unit instead. Docker restarts are perfectly fine now.

Uptime Kuma and Gotify
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A while ago I did have Uptime Kuma as part of my homelab but removed it since everything was on one physical server so if there was a huge problem UK would never pick it up since it was probably down as well. I’m now hosting it on my Media Server which while still a single point of failure it’s physically separate from my main homelab. As well as this I setup Gotify to send me notifications when services go down, these go straight to my phone so I can get near realtime downtime notifications. I’ve had to tune the thresholds in UK for some of my applications since some are less reliable than others (the ones not on my infra!).

Wireguard on Android
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For about 24 hours I lost all network connectivity on my phone (Pixel 7 Pro). It turns out that wireguard had crashed and completely nuked connectivity. After rebooting my phone it worked again. No idea why this happened but it was pretty annoying. I usually have my home wireguard VPN connected 24/7 even when on my home wifi but because my phone is silent all the time I didn’t notice, I guess I didn’t need to use my phone at all that day.

That’s it for this update, there’s still work in my todo list that I need to get around to but that can wait for a bit.

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How I build my CV from Markdown

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 11:33:49 +0000

I’ve changed site generators and cms more times than I can remember (my git repo has the entire history of this site!) the one thing I try to keep the same is my CV. It changes roughly every few years with either a new job or update in skills. I want a way that regardless of however my site is built my CV is just there ready to go.

Markdown first
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My CV is a markdown file you can see it here. It doesn’t require anything special(ish - I’ll get onto that). The idea is that you can put it in any site generator or CMS (that supports markdown) and it’ll render something. I think it’s a great approach.

Rendering outside the box
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The box here being any CMS/Static Site generator. I want it to look decent and not like whatever is rendering it at the time. I decide to use Pandoc, it’s as simple as running pandoc extra with the following args:

content/cv.md --output=public/cv.pdf --template /.pandoc/templates/eisvogel.latex --syntax-highlighting=idiomatic -V block-headings

I used the docker image extensively to test this out and even managed to contribute some docs back on using templates with docker on Ubuntu (long story!).

Pipeline
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It’s not enough to have a way of turning my CV into a PDF I don’t want to ever think about it ever again, dealing with PDFs is a hassle at the best of times so I chucked the entire process into a FrogeJo action (there’s also a spoiler for an upcoming section). This creates my cv which is then uploaded to an S3 bucket. You can see my CV here freshly built when this blog post goes live.

Anonymising my CV
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I recently applied for a new job and one of their requirements was an anonymised CV so rather than manually edit it I decided to over engineer it because I sure as hell enjoyed that more than writing STAR answers. If you take a look at the raw version of my CV you can see the following:

## Senior DevOps Engineer<!--- start --> - Remote & Manchester UK<!--- end -->

The  and  tag don’t render in markdown/HTML so by default the content still shows up. I can then sed them out when I build the anon version of my CV:

- name: Setup Anonymous CV
run: cp content/cv.md content/cv-anon.md && sed -i 's/<!--- start -->...*<!--- end -->//g' content/cv-anon.md

It then uses pandoc again to create a PDF file and the pipeline uploads it.

So there you have it, that’s how I build my CV from a markdown file into both a standard and anonymised PDF file ready for potential employers. Just because I can it’s also available rendered through Hugo and Blowfish here.

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Adding custom runners to Forgejo

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 20:42:52 +0000

This is one of those problems that now that I get it it really shouldn’t have been so hard. Like everything with development and homelabbing documentation is key.

Huge thanks to:

without their toots on Mastodon I wouldn’t have been able to grok and actually get things working.

Now that I have my forgejo instance up and running I’m in the process of migrating all my github repos to my own git forge. As part of the move I needed to setup forgejos runners so that I can run actions on the many private infrastructure repos I have.

Setting up the runners is super simple the forgejo documentation is pretty easy to understand and after following this.

What wasn’t clear was how to add in custom images so that I could tailor the runners how I wanted. My ultimate goal here was to have a runner that had the same functionality I was used to with Github runners. It turns out it’s really simple, if you follow the OCI installation method then you should have a file called .runner this lives in the data directory you defined in your docker-compose.yml.

Your runner file has a section called labels this is where you add the images you want to use. See my example below:

{
"WARNING": "This file is automatically generated by act-runner. Do not edit it manually unless you know what you are doing. Removing this file will cause act runner to re-register as a new runner.",
"id": 1,
"uuid": "",
"name": "remotelab",
"token": "",
"address": "https://code.remotelab.uk",
"labels": [
"docker:docker://node:20-bullseye",
"ubuntu-act-latest:docker://ghcr.io/catthehacker/ubuntu:act-latest"
]
}

When you restart the runner you should see you have the ubuntu-act-latest label available for your actions.

caththehackers images are great but they don’t have the aws cli installed which is a hard requirement for me since I manage a lot of AWS infrastructure with terraform 100% via gitops. To fix this I quickly hacked together a docker file to add in the cli tool:

FROM ghcr.io/catthehacker/ubuntu:act-latest
RUN curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
RUN unzip awscliv2.zip && ./aws/install

As a quick and dirty hack I pushed this up manually to forgejo (it fully supports docker images and provides a registry as well!). I can now reference that image inside my .runner file.

You can then reference this in your action:

jobs:
configure-aws:
runs-on: ubuntu-act-latest

I still have a few things to tidy up:

Automate building my custom image
Migrate all repos to forgejo
Migrate to OpenTofu

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Docker on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

Homelab Update January 2026

Chicken/Egg Docker Woes #

Uptime Kuma and Gotify #

Wireguard on Android #

How I build my CV from Markdown

Markdown first #

Rendering outside the box #

Pipeline #

Anonymising my CV #

Adding custom runners to Forgejo

Chicken/Egg Docker Woes
#

Uptime Kuma and Gotify
#

Wireguard on Android
#

Markdown first
#

Rendering outside the box
#

Pipeline
#

Anonymising my CV
#