You’ll probably know Pi-hole. It’s a popular “DNS sinkhole” – a DNS proxy server which blocks certain requests, such a as those for well-known ad serving domains. The effect is a much less ad-cluttered web experience in your home network. I’ve been using Pi-hole for several years as a Docker container on a Raspberry Pi. The Raspi is serving as a small home server on my home network. However, as much as I like Pi-hole, I felt it got loaded with new features over the years and performed slower over the time....

In June, I’ve written about my approach to starting and stopping Podman Pods using OpenRC scripts on Alpine Linux. However, that approach had two major drawbacks: First, the pods were started in the foreground, causing OpenRC to wait for all pod initialization tasks to complete. If an image needed to be pulled first, this could lead to longer delays, significantly increasing system startup times. Secondly, requesting the status of a previously started pod always stated “crashed”....

I’m running my containers with Podman in Rootless Mode on Alpine for about four months now. However, an annoying problem has haunted me ever since: When a container was connected to more than one network, outgoing connections were not working correctly. Consider a container connected to two bridge networks: $ podman run --rm -it \ --network net1 \ --network net2 \ alpine /bin/ash Inside the container, the two networks are connected correctly:...

Recently, I’ve written a blog post on how to set up Rootless Docker on Alpine Linux. Today I’m showing you how to set up Podman. Podman has a rootless architecture built in. It’s an alternative to Docker, providing an almost identical command line interface. Thus, if you’re used to Docker CLI, you won’t have any issues working with Podman. Podman was initially developed by RedHat and is available as an open source project....

As of Docker Engine v20.10, it’s possible to run the Docker daemon as a non-root user (Rooless mode). This is especially valuable in view of security aspects. Rootless mode mitigates potential vulnerabilities in the Docker daemon. However, at the time of writing, setting up Docker in rootless mode is not straightforward if you’re using Alpine Linux as your host system. This is why I summarized the steps to get Docket Rootless up and running on Alpine Linux....

I’ve recently written a tutorial which will guide you through setting up a Kubernetes cluster using K3S with virtual machines hosted at Hetzner, a German (Cloud) hosting provider. The tutorial uses K3S, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution which is perfectly suited for small VMs like Hetzner’s CX11. Additionally, the tutorial will show you how to set up Hetzner’s cloud load balancer which performs SSL offloading and forwards traffic to your Kubernetes system....

I’m a convinced user of OneDrive Personal. Bundled with M365, it’s a cheap option to get 1 TB of cloud storage. Having plenty of cloud storage at hand, I’m also using my OneDrive to run automated backups of my servers. There are various solutions capable of uploading files to OneDrive, including rclone. However, I was looking for a solution which enables me to grant my backup script only access to one specific folder instead of my entire cloud drive – better safe than sorry....

My DSL provider TAL.de offers to assign a static and a dynamic IP address on PPPoE dial in. The dynamic IP address is the primary one, used for accessing the internet. Packets to the static IP address are routed to the router as well. Here’s how to set up things up on a Unifi Security Gateway (USG). By default, USG only allows for one IP address when dialing in via PPPoE....

Recently, I wrote about the availability of the 64 bit beta version of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian). Unfortunately, the new 64 bit beta is only available in the Desktop variant, containing lots of packages most lightweight server systems won’t need. There’s no lite variant of the 64 bit beta version available at the time of writing. However, you can easily remove the Desktop packages from a running installation with two easy commands....

Traefik is a Cloud Native Edge Router, often deployed in Docker and Kubernetes environments. With little effort, you can use Telegraf to transport Traefik’s access logs to an InfluxDB, where it can be analyzed using Grafana. This setup contains the following elements: Traefik v2 runs as a Docker container on a Linux host. Traefik outputs access logs in JSON format to STDOUT. Telegraf fetched the Traefik container’s JSON output using the docker_log input plugin....