Homelab Update June 2025

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 20:25:00 +0000

Bye bye Ubuntu Server 20.04
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I moved all my apps from Ubuntu Server to Debian 12 after testing it out for a few months. It’s faster and uses less resources. There’s also no snap which is great! Migration went fine it was tedious but gave me an opportunity to clean up some tech debt I’d made when I first set the vm up. Running sudo shutdown -P now was very satisfying. I still have a backup of the vm if I need to restore though.

Migrated ingresses to Traefik in LXC
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For a while I was running 3 different Traefik setups:

primary docker vm on Ubuntu
secondary docker vm (now primary) on Debain
lxc in proxmox

Once I moved everything to file provider in lxc I could start moving everything off the old server and turn off the old ingresses. It also allowed me to setup a wildcard cert for my homelab instead of having traefik provision a new one every time I bring up a new service.

Another advantage of having traefik in lxc is that I’ve configure it in Proxmox to boot first after reboot. So I should always be able to access friendly urls as soon as possible.

NAS Cleanup
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Another chore was cleaning out some old config on my NAS, I want to try and cut down the raw read/writes. It also means it can go into power saving mode more often (hopefully).

Update power saving is working, I can tell because it sounds like a sound effect from a science fiction movie every time it spins up!

Next steps
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I’m looking at more hardware now, I want a physical k8s setup running Talos. I’m looking at a few different options including the TurinPi and Sipeed Nanocluster but the cost of compute modules is just insane for the performance they give. If anyone has any suggestions then send them my way!

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Tmux for fun and Profit

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve known about TMUX for a few years now but never got around to checking it out. It’s not until the past few weeks where I’ve spent most of my time in the terminal for various projects that I’ve really felt the need to dig in and learn the basics.

Installation - TMUX
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sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install tmux

Done

Installation - Tmuxinator
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gem install tmuxinator

The reason I use Tmuxinator is it’s a great way to set environment setups that persist through reboot. The config uses YAML which is nice and human readable and you can add your config files to a gist or dotfile repo if you want.

I’m not really going to go into the depths of using of using TMUX - this post by Hermann Vocke does a much better job than I can explaining the cool things you can do.

Configuration
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Here are some of my specific configuration in ~/.tmux.conf

# Use mouse like a peasant
set-option -g mouse on
# STFU
set-option -g visual-activity off
set-option -g visual-bell off
set-option -g visual-silence off
set-window-option -g monitor-activity off
set-option -g bell-action none
# switch panes using Alt-arrow without prefix
bind -n M-Left select-pane -L
bind -n M-Right select-pane -R
bind -n M-Up select-pane -U
bind -n M-Down select-pane -D
# remap prefix from 'C-b' to 'C-a'
unbind C-b
set-option -g prefix C-a
bind-key C-a send-prefix
# reload config file (change file location to your the tmux.conf you want to use)
bind r source-file ~/.tmux.conf

Hopefully the comments should be self explanatory, there are a lot more things I could do here but starting off simple is the way to go for me. In the future I’d like to look at styling TMUX, there are some awesome examples on /r/unixporn.

Here is a working example of my dev tmuxinator config:

name: dev
root: ~/

windows:
- editor:
 template: main-horizontal
 panes:
 - cd ~/Sites/projects/
 - cd ~/Vagrant/Convivio-VM && vagrant up
 - cd ~/Vagrant/Convivio-VM

What this does is create me a horizontal terminal and then two columns below it. The main terminal opens my project directory, the first column opens my VM directory and then brings it up, the third column moves me into the VM directory so I can run vagrant ssh when it’s up.

There’s a lot more things to do to automate my dev setup but for the time being it’s pretty handy.

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Ubuntu on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

Homelab Update June 2025

Bye bye Ubuntu Server 20.04 #

Migrated ingresses to Traefik in LXC #

NAS Cleanup #

Next steps #