A while ago I stumbled upon podman, which touts itself as an alternative to Docker. Not only does podman not use any big fat daemons™ but it makes it rather easy to run containers in a user-namespace, i.e. with greatly restricted privileges on your system. The fun thing is: you are still root within the container!

Trying to implement some sort of automatic versioning based on your git commits or tags is not as easy as it should seem. The idea is to use a feature built into the revision control system to modify your project files and increment version counters automatically or embed commit information into software builds - in my case: the --version output of Go applications built with cobra.

I am supposed to have a 500 Mbps internet line at home. Last week it really didn’t feel like that (again). Pages would take ages to load, streams would stutter miserably or simply abort and downloading OS updates simply timed out. So I set out to measure my actual bandwidth over a longer period of time.

It is becoming common knowledge that you should use two-factor authentication whenever possible. Some services allow the use of TOTP apps on your smartphone, some only want so send you SMS codes .. and others use proprietary tokens.

Trying to install VMware ESXi on a number of Intel Bay-Trail boards apparently fails with a hanged installation right after a message like Relocating modules and starting the kernel. There’s multiple forum posts around the internet where people suggest various workarounds, which never seemed to work for me.

One suggestion which stood out to me as most promising was completely disabling the internal graphics chip and using a dicrete graphics card in the PCI Express slot. Now, I didn’t want to buy a graphics card just to make the installation work - especially since this system would mostly be used completely headless: power cord, two ethernet cables and done.

This is an update over my earlier post about PXE booting. I’ve learned a few more things and refined some rough edges.

Update: By now I've learned even more. See [homelab/bootstrap](https://semjonov.de/docs/homelab/bootstrap/) for an updated guide.

My Motivation is similar to the last post: I started building my homelab with virtual machines. Most of them are based on a minimal CentOS 7 installation, and as such I have a lot of very similar systems. Yes, I could probably use containers to great effect. But I prefer the separation/isolation that I get from virtual machines on ESXi.

I used KeePassX to generate a new, 24 character password with all character types enabled. This was supposed to replace the default ADMIN/ADMIN combination for IPMI on my ESXi box. So I opened the appropriate page through a browser, navigated to Configuration > Users and modified the ADMIN user.

It happily accepted the new password with no warning whatsoever and I logged out to test it .. oh well .. it didn’t work.

Today I set out to setup a local CentOS mirror for quicker PXE installations of my virtual machines. In the long run this will probably be superseded by a Spacewalk machine (update: discontinued on May 31, 2020) and until now netboot.xyz has served me well. For the time being I just wanted a faster alternative.