Thu 03 March 2022
tags: esxi sysadmin homelab pxe
Well, here I am again, 6 months between posts. It's not exactly because of procrastination, or at least not because I was procrastinating on writing. As the title and summary might suggest, I had a few problems to fix that stood between me and making an update. Or rather, updates stood between me and making an update.
First, the nice stuff. I did end up throwing together the Nextcloud server I mentioned in my last post, and it's been fairly successful so far. I had issues with getting Rocky to work for me since I was fairly unfamiliar with it, and the documentation I was following for Nextcloud setup was spotty at best. I should've just restarted with a different guide, but instead I took the easy route out and installed Debian. From there, I was able to get Nextcloud set up, and I actually have the full 3 TB disk (or most of it) for storage! Honestly the Nextcloud server isn't quite as much a part of my lab as the rest of my projects, so I'm willing to let it be more of a pet than cattle (not like there's much difference for me currently). I did have a problem a few months ago when I tried to do an application update within Nextcloud, which added a new config option that broke redirects. I mostly figured out what was broken and commented out the option, and suddenly I could log in and access files again! Two lessons learned from that:
Don't rush upgrades to the newest version of everything. This is a server, not a desktop/workstation.
If you do upgrade something, back up your configs first. I'm particularly bad at that since I don't really have backups set up for anything, but that's a work in progress.
The rest of the lab is partially stalled out. I have a new Minecraft server for version 1.18, which released 3 months ago, but other than that I don't have much to show. The FTP server I set up isn't working as a PXE boot server yet, which means I can't do automated installs. I might wipe and restart that since I think I messed up some configs, but it does work for FTP. If I can figure out how to get it to do a network boot then I can start installing from the FTP server, and automating that should be as simple as modifying the kickstart config to carry over pre-existing options. I can also script some things, like copying a public key file to the sysadmin user's home directory (since I don't use my personal account as the admin), which should let me start using Ansible immediately after installation is done. Right now I still have too much to do manually, so once again... I have pets, not cattle. The git server I mentioned last time has also stalled out, partially because I've been fiddling with everything else and partially because I still can't decide between a basic cgit frontend or something nicer like Gitea or Gogs . I want to lean toward cgit, but I should make sure I get my user account set up properly before doing that.
Now, onto breaking Apache. This site is running on a CentOS VPS served by DigitalOcean. I set this up before I was super familiar with CentOS, and I basically followed some of DO's tutorials on getting it set up due to any potential differences. The big change for me was referencing httpd instead of Apache. Configs are also in a different location, and then there's SELinux to manage. Unfortunately, at some point I messed up SELinux configs, so when it came time to restart httpd... the service broke. It couldn't access the log file location I had set up, as it was actually locked as read-only by the httpd process! I wrestled with a dozen different "solutions" that didn't work, and in the end I just resorted to following the setup guide step by step to see if I'd missed something. As it turns out, I had - a quick semanage command followed by restorecon and I was back in business! My ssl cert is broken now, but that's a relatively simple fix given that I'm using Let's Encrypt to issue my cert.
So yeah, a bit of progress in that I've had a working Nextcloud server for several months now, but unfortunate lack of progress elsewhere. I'm focusing on three main things now: fixing my PXE boot server, building out my storage, and the RHCSA cert. The first PXE server is what will allow me to accelerate my lab, since that's the start to automating my installations. Building out my storage will come in the form of a NAS that I'm planning, I'll be buying a used CPU/motherboard combo that has 8 SATA ports and two M.2 slots built in - plenty for a boot drive and eventually 8 spinning disks. That's probably going to run FreeNAS or a variant thereof, I haven't gotten that far yet. Last, pursuing the RHCSA cert will hopefully teach me some of the skills I need to actually adminster my lab, and it will give a shiny piece of paper that I can put on my resume. That's what the lab is for in the end, right? The whole point is to give me a playground to learn the skills I will need in order to secure a better job for myself. I have a study guide so hopefully that will also help me learn what I need, and I'm prepping a box with real RHEL to play with. I'm feeling pretty positive about it, and the excitement from my last post is still carrying over. Who knows, maybe after almost two years here I can use my lab properly?