Hi! I’m John.

This is where I share what I know about computers and anything else I find interesting. I mostly write about my Homelab, but I also talk about self-hosting, CLI tools, networking, Docker and Home Automation. I really hope you learn something new from here :)

Setting up failover for this blog using HAProxy

This is part of a series of blog posts I’m writing about hosting this blog from my homelab. You can find the previous part here This blog is being hosted on a Docker container in my homelab (see this post for more details). But the actual machine serving the requests is a Linode VPS. I do this because my ISP uses CG-NAT and therefore I can’t open a port from my home network out to the public internet....

September 20, 2024

Setting up a self-hosted alternative to Google Maps Timeline

I’m a big fan of the Google Maps Timeline feature. I think it’s really cool that I can just go back, let’s say, 2 years in the past and see exactly where I was at that time. Right now, the furthest I can go back in my timeline history is something like 5 years. But I believe the nostalgia factor is going to be much bigger when I’m older and I check back to see what I was doing 30 years ago....

August 25, 2024

Monitoring Docker Containers using Grafana, InfluxDB and Telegraf

My homelab has over 40 Docker containers running on it right now. Most of them are open source services like Jellyfin, Paperless-ngx, Uptime Kuma and so on (you can find more like these at r/selfhosted). And a few others are running my personal projects like this blog. One issue you will eventually encounter when running a lot of containers is figuring out if any of them are down. Sure you could run the docker ps -a command and use grep to filter any containers that are down, but this takes time and its kinda annoying to go through the text output line by line....

August 11, 2024

Creating a CI/CD Pipeline using Jenkins and Docker for this Blog

This is part of a series of blog posts I’m writing about hosting this blog from my homelab. You can find part 1 here: Hosting a blog from your Homelab My current workflow for creating a new blog post is this: Run a Hugo command to create a new markdown file. Write my content in the file. Run the hugo command to generate the build files. Run a command to create a new docker image based on httpd which will serve the build files....

July 10, 2024

Hosting a blog from your Homelab

This blog is currently being hosted on my homelab in a docker container. I have a Wireguard VPN connecting my homelab and my VPS on Linode. The VPS has Nginx Proxy Manager running in a docker container which is publicly exposed on port 80. Then I added a proxy host in Nginx so that all requests to blog.akjohn.dev gets redirected to the docker container in my homelab. One of the most common roadblocks you’ll face when trying to expose almost anything from your home network to the public Internet is bypassing CGNAT....

July 1, 2024

Vim Adventures Quiz

I’ve been a Vim user for about 4 years now. I love it and use it as my primary IDE (NeoVim with a custom AstroNvim config). But even though I’ve been using it for a long time, I’m still learning new things about it! I found this really cool website called Vim Adventures. It’s basically a video game running in a web browser that teaches you Vim commands as you progress through it....

June 14, 2024

My Homelab Setup June 2024 (Hardware)

My homelab setup has gone through a few different iterations over the years. I started with a Raspberry Pi 3 Mobel B with a couple of USB hard disk drives attached to it. Then I upgraded to an old laptop running headless Ubuntu. And finally, I’m now running my self hosted services on a desktop tower PC with around 15TB of storage attached to it. I’m also running OPNsense on a mini-pc and Home Assistant on the Pi that I mentioned....

June 7, 2024

Hello World!

This is my first post on my new personal website and blog. Hopefully, this is one of many to come :) Right now, I’m using Hugo to create this site, but the plan is to eventually write my own static site generator and move all my posts to that. I’ll be blogging about my home lab, software and hardware projects and anything else I find interesting.

May 25, 2024