Tags on blog.rymcg.tech

Audio

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0600

Linux

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0600

Pipewire

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0600

Artix

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Home-Manager

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Sway

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Networking

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0600

Git

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Libvirt

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0600

Nixos

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0600

Traefik

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:54:00 -0600

Bash

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0600

Just

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0600

Docker

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 23:00:00 -0600

Rclone

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 13:54:00 -0600

Webdav

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 13:54:00 -0600

Ssh

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 13:54:00 -0600

Wireguard

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 23:39:00 -0600

Pfsense

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 11:46:03 -0700

k3s

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Self-Hosted Literate K3s Cluster

This series of blog posts comprises a Literate Programming notebook for the BASH shell, for the purpose of bootstrapping a self-hosted K3s kubernetes cluster using GitOps (Git+DevOps) principles. Flux (v2) is a controller that runs on top of kubernetes, that will synchronize your git repositories, containing all of your kubernetes manifests (YAML), and automatically apply these changes to your cluster. With Flux, you can administer all of your infrastructure via pull request!

Self-hosted means running full-stack, open-source software, on top of commodity computer hardware or virtual machines, with as little reliance on external services as feasable. It doesn’t mean you have to run on bare-metal hardware in your basement, that you built from transistors and Verilog, but it does mean that you should be able to do that if you want to! (The example cluster will keep it simple, and just use a simple DigitalOcean droplet instead. 😉) Kubernetes is an abstraction that makes the host platform irrelevant, giving you this freedom back. You can run the same workloads in K3s as you can in any other enterprise kubernetes host. K3s is easy to install, and runs just about anywhere, on bare-metal, on virtual machines (droplets), in docker, as well as several different CPU architectures. However, this blog will only focus on using the amd64 architecture. Sorry, Raspberry Pis are NOT tested to work with these instructions.

In this series, you will learn, and more:

How to setup your workstation for all development tools. (Tested on Arch Linux, but should work on any OS with the BASH shell.) Or, how to create a utility container, with all of the tools inside, and keeping your host system clean.
How to create a K3s cluster on generic hardware, or on DigitalOcean.
How to host Traefik (v2) to proxy HTTP and TCP traffic (Ingress) to your applications, giving you free TLS (https) certificates from Let’s Encrypt (best option for public websites) or from your private Certificate Authority via Step-CA (for private APIs and Mutual TLS) (Only Step CLI with an offline CA is described thus far [most secure option], but you could run your own online ACME CA if you want to [but harder to secure]).
How to host your own public and private git repositories in Gitea (and how to mirror them to GitHub for backup.)
How to host Flux (v2), such that your cluster state is driven by your git repository state. (use git push, not kubectl apply).
How to host a private container registry for hosting your own container images.
How to host simple applications like Wordpress, and the MySQL database.
How to create “serverless” functions with OpenFaaS.
How to create a Continuous Integration platform with Drone.

This blog uses Literate Programming concepts. You just need a web-browser and a BASH terminal. There are literal code blocks for you to copy and paste into your terminal to reproduce all of the files and commands necessary for this setup. There is no additional git repository you need to clone or fork. The commands you see on this blog are all you need, in order to create your own self-hosted git repository, from scratch. This will all be explained in detail in Part 1.

You can discuss this blog on Matrix (Element): #blog-rymcg-tech:enigmacurry.com

This blog is copyright EnigmaCurry and dual-licensed CC-BY-SA and MIT. The source is on github: enigmacurry/blog.rymcg.tech and PRs are welcome. ❤️

nixos-vm-template

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

nixos-vm-template

nixos-vm-template is a tool for building and managing NixOS virtual machines with a focus on immutability and reproducibility. It supports multiple backends (libvirt for local development, Proxmox for server infrastructure) and provides a unified interface for creating, upgrading, and managing VMs.

The core design uses an immutable architecture: a read-only root filesystem containing the NixOS system, with mutable state isolated on a separate /var disk. Multiple VMs can share a single base image through QCOW2 backing files, and upgrades happen by replacing the boot image while preserving all data. This makes VMs reproducible, easy to roll back, and resistant to filesystem corruption.

For cases where you need a fully writable system - NixOS experimentation, Nix development, or learning - the tool also supports mutable VMs with a single read-write disk and the full nix toolchain available.

In part one: Running code agents in an immutable NixOS VM, we set up a development VM on a laptop using libvirt, configure Claude Code or Open Code inside the VM, and establish a git-based workflow for testing the agent’s work on other machines. We also cover TRAMP for remote editing with Emacs.

In part two: Bootstrapping a Docker server with immutable NixOS on Proxmox, we deploy VMs to a Proxmox server instead of local libvirt. We walk through the Proxmox backend configuration, create a Docker server VM, and cover firewall rules, snapshots, backups, and the identity sync mechanism.

In part three: Mutable VMs are cool too, we introduce mutable VM support for interactive NixOS development. We discuss the tradeoffs between immutable and mutable architectures, how to create and upgrade mutable VMs, and when to use each approach.

In part four: Managing VMs with home-manager and sway-home, we integrate nixos-vm-template into a home-manager workflow using sway-home. We cover the vm alias, the nix store binding, creating backend-specific aliases for Proxmox, and disk space reclamation with garbage collection.

You can discuss this blog on Matrix (Element): #blog-rymcg-tech:enigmacurry.com

This blog is copyright EnigmaCurry and dual-licensed CC-BY-SA and MIT. The source is on github: enigmacurry/blog.rymcg.tech and PRs are welcome. ❤️

proxmox

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Proxmox

Proxmox VE is an open source Virtual Machine hypervisor Operating System, built on top of Debian Linux. It has a fully programmable API, can operate as a cluster, and can behave as your own self-hosted mini cloud, for compute and storage. Proxmox excels as an agile research and development environment, making it easy to create new virtual machines, whenever you have new ideas to try, or to automate resources as part of a script. New VMs are auto-configured from cloud-init, pre-provisioning your SSH keys, making it really feel similar to creating a Droplet on DigitalOcean, except that it is all running on your own self-hosted hardware.

Proxmox is also a good choice for certain production roles: if you have a relatively small number of very large computers, Proxmox can help you to “carve out” the larger machines into smaller VMs. It should be stressed however, that if you do run all your docker/kubernetes nodes on the same physical host, you are not protected from hardware or network failures. Large scale production scenarios will likely be better served by installing a native Kubernetes distribution (K3s) onto multiple bare-metal machines, rather than using Proxmox. However, if you still need to use VMs, you can still achieve High Availability with Proxmox by installing several nodes, and forming a cluster.

Parts 1-3 of this series have recently been re-written. (There was an older series focusing on a virtual proxmox installation, but I have moved it to the virtual-proxmox tag, as it is not useful for the majority of bare-metal proxmox installs.)

In part one: Installation and Setup, we discuss the steps to install and configure Proxmox on your own hardware.

In part two: Networking, we discuss the difference between bridge networking and NAT, and when to use one over the other. A script to help you setup NAT is included.

In part three: Notifications, we configure the notification system to send us all server notifications as an email through our external SMTP server and/or Gotify client.

In part four: Containers we discuss Proxmox support for LXC containers, which are a lightweight shared-kernel alternative to virtualized machines. Containers offer quicker start up time and efficient resource utilization. Unlike Docker containers, LXC containers are stateful and run systemd inside, and offer the same lifecycle as if it were a VM.

In part five: KVM and Cloud-Init we use a shell script to generate several KVM virtual machine templates from various distributions, including Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and even FreeBSD (can’t do that one with a container!)

In part six: nftables home LAN router we build a network router for the home LAN inside a KVM virtual machine using PCI passthrough for a four port network interface, and install a nftables firewall, dnsmasq DHCP server, and dnscrypt-proxy DNS server.

In part seven: proxmox in proxmox we install a virtual proxmox inside of a native proxmox host. This is very useful for testing purposes, where you can add a bunch of virtual disks and play around with different ZFS pool configurations. Use the snapshot feature to create restore points, especially helpful when writing documentation about proxmox itself.

In part eight: TrueNAS Core we install TrueNAS Core as a Network Attached Storage service, useful for sharing files, and for remounting via NFS to provision other VM disks on the same proxmox host.

In part nine: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) we create an isolated private network where VMs have no direct internet access. A dedicated router VM running nifty-filter provides the only path to the outside world, giving you full control over egress traffic.

You can discuss this blog on Matrix (Element): #blog-rymcg-tech:enigmacurry.com

This blog is copyright EnigmaCurry and dual-licensed CC-BY-SA and MIT. The source is on github: enigmacurry/blog.rymcg.tech and PRs are welcome. ❤️

proxmox

ryan-blog@rymcg.tech (EnigmaCurry) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Virtual Proxmox

Yo dawg, you can run Proxmox inside another virtual machine, through nested virtualization. In part one: Virtual Proxmox, you will learn how to install Proxmox on any Linux computer (inside of an existing operating system). Proxmox itself will be running in a KVM virtual machine. (Or you can skip this step and install on real hardware.) On top of Proxmox, you will prepare an Ubuntu VM template, configuring the default VM size (cpu+memory+storage), and adding your SSH keys for cloud-init. You can clone new VMs using the template anytime (and there’s a REST API!), thus setting up your first Virtual Proxmox development cloud. Finally, you will create a small K3s Kubernetes cluster using two or three of these nested Proxmox KVM nodes, and you can use this for your local development environment.

You can discuss this blog on Matrix (Element): #blog-rymcg-tech:enigmacurry.com

This blog is copyright EnigmaCurry and dual-licensed CC-BY-SA and MIT. The source is on github: enigmacurry/blog.rymcg.tech and PRs are welcome. ❤️