Sign in

Alexander

@alexsguardian.net
78 followers 98 following 520 posts

DevOps Engineer by day, network whisperer by night, and occasional code magician. I juggle cloud infrastructure and scripts while wondering if sleep is just a myth. Currently stuck in 🇺🇸 blog.alexsguardian.net

PostsRepliesMedia
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 26/09/2026
Bet y'all will never guess where 99% of the emails came from in my spam folder. And no I won't read them. Gonna see how many I get before I delete them all 🤣 Hint: It's mostly desperate pleas for money for something in November based on the subject lines.
Picture of 130 Spam emails sitting unread in my email
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 14/09/2026
Been awhile. Got back from the beach yesterday. Much needed RNR. Also stopped at the Dover AFB Air Mobility Museum. Fam got a personal tour from an ex C-141A pilot which was awesome. Pretty cool place! Kiddos got to see a few C-5's and C-17's doing touch and goes too. Back to work tomorrow 😅
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 17/08/2026
It's so fun when GitHub is having issues. 😤
010
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 02/08/2026
Ok still gonna post it. I did a little digging and what it offers doesn't compare to what I've built so. I also looked into Komodo and doco-cd. The simplicity I have works well and adding ANOTHER service doesn't seem worth it. Gotta keep the #homelab easy to maintain.
110
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 01/08/2026
So I've been working on my #GitOps setup and accompanying blog post. Was finishing it and well... Arcane exists 🤦 Not sure I even want to post my custom workflow + bash setup anymore lol. getarcane.app
getarcane.app
010
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 20/07/2026
Wife and I were at dinner the other week for our anniversary. A family came in with a 5 yr old who was clearly tired. Poor kid was just not having it. The other two nearby tables were muttering about it and after they took the kid outside one was like 'parents are too soft I woulda hit them'.
100
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 08/07/2026
@stefanmara.com
010
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 06/07/2026
Meet Tracearr: The Ultimate Monitoring Platform for Media Servers. Part 1: blog.alexsguardian.net/posts/2026/0... Part 2: blog.alexsguardian.net/posts/2026/0...
blog.alexsguardian.net
Meet Tracearr: The Ultimate Monitoring Platform for Media Servers - Part 1 | Alex's Blog
An overview of Tracearr, a modern open-source monitoring platform for Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby servers.
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 06/07/2026
Sneak peek at the coming compose rewrite update for nzb360's radarr integration. Big feature: Sync'd filters between radarr web and nzb! Looking forward to the sonarr one soon as well!
nzb360's new radarr integration view. nzb360's new single media detail page for radarr.
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 04/07/2026
And yet you still refuse to add Org level environments. smh
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 02/07/2026
So I just got my #GitOps flow working in my homelab. My swarm cluster services can now be automatically updated based on code changes! Renovate makes pr to my forgejo repo > i review and merge > workflow runs via an on host runner and deploys the swarm stack update. 🥰 Adding this to the blog queue
210
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 25/06/2026
A week full of meetings and my voice decided to take a hike on Monday. It's been great... 😭
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 18/06/2026
Me: *getting backlog work done* Me: *open outlook to respond to an internal email* Customer: ".... URGENT ISSUE PLS FIX" Me: 🫪
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 12/06/2026
AWS be slamming my email with notifications about deprecated lambda runtimes rn. 😭
static.klipy.com
Increasing Mailbox Push Notifications
Alt: Increasing Mailbox Push Notifications
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 11/06/2026
Been a hot minute since I posted here. The good news is, I'm now Mr Senior #DevOps Engineer at work. Only downside is now I get dragged into more stuff so I get less work done 🤣 Other good? news is I now have a fleet of Claude agents to help me write documents which frees up more of my time.
210
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 24/05/2026
Down in the basement cleaning today and was trying to figure out why there was a lemon cleaner scent. Turns out the construction bags we got for junking stuff smell like a lemon cleaner. It's so faint it took forever to figure it out. It's been driving my wife and I mad 🤣
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 14/05/2026
Tore apart an old IDE HDD and decided to finally use the Bambu Lab clock kit that came with my A1. Going to laser cut a wood frame for the clock face and probably 3d print a center insert/washer to replace the metal one.
HDD platter clock
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 06/05/2026
#Ubiquiti added support for automatic certificate management to Unifi Drive via Let's Encrypt. BE GONE AUTOMATION SCRIPTS... HELLO NATIVE SUPPORT!
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 03/05/2026
Helped my FIL out re-tracking his skid loader today. One of the old tracks ripped and came off. Had to replace that one on a hill (which was sketchy af). The second one was much easier on flat ground and only took 40 min compared to 3.5hr. 😅
Kubota SVL 75 skid loader with a newly installed track.Replacing the broken track on a hill
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 26/04/2026
Beefed up the filtration capacity for our yellow belly. The old 407 couldn't keep up anymore. Hopefully a 925gal/hr filter keeps up 🤣 He also didn't seem to mind being picked up today. Had his head out and wasn't trying to bite me 🥰
Left: Fluval 407 Canister Filter (old). 383gal/hr
Right: Fluval FX6 canister filter (new) 925gal/hrJack the yellow belly slider
100
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 19/04/2026
This last week I was putting in 18hr days to get a production system deployed. First one using #Terraform instead of our bash deployment scripts. It's extremely satisfying seeing a stack deployed via Terraform. Proper tags, prefixing, etc. Now to plan the migration of our other deployments. 😅
110
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 10/04/2026
@aceofspadescard.bsky.social gonna need you to step up your game sir.
100
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 08/04/2026
A company actually updating pricing tiers and not screwing over customers? Y'all just made my team at work extremely happy. @tailscale.com ♥️
031
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 07/04/2026
Currently in the process of updating our deployments at work to use #Terraform We are deploying to a new region this week, and I'm trying super hard to get as much into TF as possible before I deploy. It's going about as well as you'd expect 😅
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 03/04/2026
Organization 👏 Level 👏 Environments 👏 pls I beg 😭 github.com/orgs/communi...
github.com
Organization-wide Environments and Environment Secrets · community · Discussion #15379
If you have a lot of repositories with microservices deploying to the same environments (e.g. the same Kubernetes clusters, say), it can be useful to have a set of secrets available to all reposito...
010
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 02/04/2026
Godspeed #ArtemisII! 🚀
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 27/03/2026
One more day then it's off to #Ottawa 🇨🇦 for the week. Get to hang with my boy @stefanmara.com 🎉 I have an in progress post on #Tracearr that I'll hopefully get some time to finish while at the hotel. And hopefully I'll also get a chance to start my other one on cluster v3 + Dozzle/Beszel. 🤞
010
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 23/03/2026
Can we go back in time where 64GB of DDR4 ECC costs $60-80. Please?
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 22/03/2026
So I've been 1:1 upgrading nodes in my new cluster to newer optiplex micros. I designed this cluster to handle node drops for maintenance (1 at a time). However I discovered today that I forgot to update the keepalived config file with the new nic name on a prior node upgrade.
110
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 17/03/2026
So something I did not foresee when I deployed my new cluster with CephFS.. Host times not being in sync. May have to do a @jeffgeerling.com and deploy an rpi with a time hat for local NTP 😅 So far moving to chrony and using two Maryland NIST sources seems to have stopped the skew errors for now.
021
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 13/03/2026
When people show me their Traefik configs and I compare them to my 2-4 line Caddy config per service. 😂 Clean config + clean stack files 💪
001
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 05/03/2026
After giving up on my conversion to #kubernetes, for now. I will say my new cluster config using Cephfs + Docker swarm, on Debian 13, has been rock solid. Debating if I want to add a fourth node though. 🤔
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 05/03/2026
Adding military conflict to my disaster recovery plans was not on my 2026 work bingo card. inb4 #AWS invests in anti missile/drone defenses for data centers. smh.
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 01/03/2026
Woke up this morning to down alerts for our stack deployed in the UAE via AWS. Couldn't think of a good reason as to why it potentially went dark.
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 27/02/2026
Also hit a roadblock... Need the next update of #rustfs. Which should hopefully be including the ability to read docker secrets from files. Trying to keep private stuff out of env. w/o an s3 backend I can't redeploy my #forgejo, or outline instances. I may just have to spin up minio again :/
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 27/02/2026
The fact that this has to exists to fix an extremely annoying 'feature' of Docker Swarm. github.com/newsnowlabs/... ty Struan for making it ❤️ Its crazy #docker swarm still relies on SNAT masquerade. Let me have my remote client IPs pls.
github.com
GitHub - newsnowlabs/docker-ingress-routing-daemon: Docker swarm daemon that modifies ingress mesh routing to expose true client IPs to service containers
Docker swarm daemon that modifies ingress mesh routing to expose true client IPs to service containers - newsnowlabs/docker-ingress-routing-daemon
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 25/02/2026
Also this happened to me again on an arm instance... This time though I can't seem to recover it.... Good thing its just my small instance in our dev account. So if I end up having to blow it away I can just remount my data volume to a new instance.
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 25/02/2026
Slowly been rebuilding my #homelab cluster on the new #Debian 13 + #CephFS setup. Just got done deploying #Dozzle to the swarm cluster + remote agents on my @unraid.net box and another remote Docker host. Decided this time around I'd make only 2 of the 3 nodes swarm managers.
Screenshot of the Dozzle dashboard showing 5 hosts online. 3 in a Docker swarm and 2 remote hosts.output of `docker node ls` showing 3 nodes in the Docker swarm cluster
100
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 20/02/2026
Nothing like waking up to Teams showing +50 unread. Early morning RCAs are fun. #DevOps
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 17/02/2026
#DevOps Me: Updating Amazon 2023 AMI instance to newer version EC2: `/boot/initramfs-6.1.161-183.298.amzn2023.x86_64.img' not found. Me:
media.tenor.com
a young boy is laughing with his mouth open in a striped shirt .
Alt: A kid at a doctors office screaming (in pain or anger idk).
100
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 16/02/2026
Man I need to chill on the super late nights. I can't seem to handle it well anymore. I feel like crap. 😭 Though it was important. The boys and I were looking for a #Discord alternative. Eyeing @fluxer.app rn but waiting for that self hosted option. Hopefully with postgres support at some point!
120
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 10/02/2026
These @github.com outages are becoming way too frequent. lol. Also when: github.com/community/co...
github.com
Organization-wide Environments and Environment Secrets · community · Discussion #15379
If you have a lot of repositories with microservices deploying to the same environments (e.g. the same Kubernetes clusters, say), it can be useful to have a set of secrets available to all reposito...
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 07/02/2026
In other news our first #DevOps candidate accepted their offer!
media.tenor.com
spongebob squarepants is smiling and holding a shovel in his hand
Alt: spongebob squarepants is smiling excitedly moving.
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 07/02/2026
Two more hockey games for the season! Then it's back to normal for 2 weeks before the spring stuff starts 🤣
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 02/02/2026
Making the first offer to a candidate this week! The #DevOps team is growing 💪
000
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 29/01/2026
This Friday will be the first time I'm the interviewer rather than the interviewee. Hopefully it goes well 😅
010
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 24/01/2026
Life of a two kid Ice Hockey parent. - Leave house at 4:30am to drive an 1:30hr to another state for a 7am game. -Play game. -Drive another hour to another state for another game for kid #2. - Play game. Then drive 2:30hr home. Wouldn't change a thing though :)
110
Alexander @alexsguardian.net · 23/01/2026
#DevOps
"We can allocate all of your spend" 
"Without retagging everything, right?" 
"..." 
"Without retagging everything, right?"
030
Reposted by Alexander
Jeff Geerling @jeffgeerling.com · 21/01/2026
The Drupal -> static site migration is nearly complete. I've migrated 1,000+ posts, and now 13,000+ comments (into Remark42). All that's left is search: www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/mi...
jeffgeerling.com
Migrating 13,000 Comments from Drupal to Hugo
After 16 years on the LAMP stack, I finished migrating this website from Drupal to Hugo a few weeks ago. What's old is new, as this blog was originally built with Thingamablog, a Java-based Static Sit...
3563