Not long ago Puppet released the Puppet Development Kit (PDK) which was designed to simplify the process of creating Puppet modules to a consistent standard. Until I wrote the folding@home module, I had never written a module for the forge and I was a little concerned I wouldn’t get the coding standards correct. This post is a summary of how I used PDK, as well a Litmus and Vagrant to write and test a module.

Ubuntu 20.04 was released last week, so I set about creating a new image for our internal virtualisation platform. This post is about how we use Packer to automate the creation of images and what we had to do to get it to build Ubuntu 20.04.

It’s fair to say that coronavirus has had a huge impact on our day-to-day lives. Many organisations have really stepped up and are putting huge amounts of effort into helping the world deal with it. One small thing I saw several references to, though, was the Folding@Home project. It’s something I had contributed to before, but had largely forgotten was a thing. It’s main purpose is to simulate protein folding with the goal of using that information to allow medical researchers to develop vaccines and other treatments for various illnesses.

I’ve been using PRTG at work for a long time now, and recently started using the free tier at home for my own projects. It works really well, but one of the things I found quite lacking was it’s ability to create dashboards. Sure, you have maps but there’s only so much you can do there, and they just don’t look all that good.

A while back I started a process to convert VHS tapes to digital videos and part of that involved transcoding the mpg files that were captured to slightly more reasonable h264 mp4 files.

During my time off work I started on a project I’ve been wanting to do for a while now. I wanted to make a home dashboard that displayed, at least, our shared google calendar. If it could show other information as well, then so much the better.

As I’m sure many people do, we have a huge stack of old VHS tapes and a VHS player that I really don’t want sat under my TV any more. On the other hand, I do have a Roku sitting there, and Plex Media Server set up on my LAN so I formed a cunning plan: I would digitise all our VHS tapes and store the resulting files in Plex so we could watch them on any TV in the house whenever we wanted.

I was having a moan about my NAS (a Western Digital My Cloud) the other day and thought that I could build a better one using a Raspberry Pi.

I was sat my computer the other night and something occurred to me. My home network has got a little out of hand.

I have an interesting problem at the moment where a selection of our VMs will stop passing network traffic. It doesn’t seem to be a flat out disconnect, rather it behaves more like the virtual switch is just dropping packets instead of forwarding them on like a good switch should.