I see it’s been a very long time since I’ve updated anything here. I’ve started a new project, a little more hands-on than some of my previous, more online-tech related ones. I made what much of my family considers to be a somewhat unwise purchase, a 1958 utility trailer: I’m planning on making it into a custom mini-overland style camper for some solo travel shenanigans in the not so distant future.

I’ve been remiss in updating here, but other than incredible heat outside there’s not been a ton going on. Lots of small progress on things that nobody will care about, upgrades to the house (security cameras, wifi coverage upgrades, etc) and ongoing vehicle maintenance. I did “finish” my kayak trailer, but so far have only used it once. If anyone knows where I could find a 20’ shipping container for a reasonable price let me know.

It’s been long enough since I wrote anything here that it only made sense to start over, wipe the blog slate clean. It had become a dumping ground of poorly written stream-of-consciousness type of posts that meant nothing to anyone, least of all myself. I’ve decided to re-dedicate this as a bit of a personal project log. There won’t be any real set structure, or cadence of posts. If I think about it, I’ll document whatever side project I’ve worked on recently here, with pictures or video or whatever.

In part one of this little series, I covered in some detail my investigation of oVirt as a potential replacement for XenServer in my environments. While I feel it is a very robust product, the lack of functional .ova import / export is a deal breaker for most of my use cases, since the day job has a lot of developers that depend on that. Today, we’re going to look at Proxmox VE, another KVM/LXC based platform but based on Debian this time instead of CentOS.

Regular readers will remember that I’m still pissed at Citrix for some of their recent product feature level decisions; and I’m not alone. I’ve updated my last post with some early info on XCP-ng already, but it’s very early days there, so there’s no real certainty of when it will come about. To that end, I’ve been re-visiting some of the various other platforms I’ve used over the years for headless server virtualization.

As I digressed in my last post, virtualizing pfSense wasn’t as difficult as I expected. From what I’d read online I was afraid it would have some adverse affect on network performance, especially considering most of my “infrastructure” is reclaimed, second-hand, or otherwise cast-off from production use. It fully appears, however, that these fears were unfounded (standard Spectrum cable, don’t judge): Physical 32bit Xen Virtualized 64bit Barely noticeable, and honestly well within the standard variance of such types of throughput tests.

I run Archlinux on most of my workstations, including the trusty Lenovo t420 that I carry around. It’s been an amazing little tool, and remarkably functional for close to 6 years now. Try that with a freakin’ Macbook. Anyway, recently I noticed that it would occasionally freeze right after waking up from suspend to RAM, but only the second time I suspended it after a cold-boot. The first suspend/resume cycle would work just fine, but on the second resume it would wake up the display then immediately freeze, no mouse movement, no TTY switching, nothing.

Building out an InfluxDB host for metrics collection is pretty straightforward, even piping things into it from various sources isn’t difficult, thanks to the multitude of plugins available out of the box, including some very handy SNMP gathering that I’ll likely go into later when the mood strikes and I have more time. I did exactly this at the day gig not long ago to replace the bulky, somewhat cumbersome check_mk based monitoring I initially set up when I started here (they had nothing in place, except for a few broken zabbix clients, no collection point).

Update Oct 20, 2017 As pointed out in the comments below, most of this is no longer needed since the official release of the telegraf package for pfSense 2.4 and above. I'm still leaving it up for posterity. If any of the pfSense folks read this, some extra configuration options on the settings page for the plugin would be nice to see; but otherwise works like a charm. If you’re like me, a sexy looking dashboard is a difficult thing to look away from.

Update Jan 31, 2018 This is verified (by me, at least) to work on both the official XenServer 7.2, and with the experimental xcp-ng. I've also semi-automated the process with these Ansible bits for new hardware / pool upgrades. Don’t get me wrong, XenServer 7 is a huge improvement over previous versions, and still my product of choice for those that don’t want to pay a literal fortune for vmWare licensing.