Nonsense and other useful things

I got a new laptop last week for work and needed to get it ready. Now new laptops usually mean new hardware and that can spell problems if you are installing linux. This is because the latest hardware may be used and linux usually needs some time to catch up with the latest hardware. This started out with the graphical installation not working. Luckily though, rocky linux 9 also supports a VNC install. So this issue was solved by connecting the laptop to wired ethernet and using VNC from another laptop to do the installation. This all went without problems. Next up was the NVIDIA driver for which I am using the RPM packages from the NVIDIA CUDA repository. These usually work fine, however, this time there was a mismatch where the driver was installed in the wrong directory; easily fixed though by fooling the NVIDIA RPMs by creating a symbolic link in /lib/modules: 5.14.0-162.12.1.el9_1.x86_64 -> 5.14.0-162.12.1.el9_1.0.2.x86_64/.

Finally, there was the sanity check to verify all devices such as webcam, microphone, speakers etc.. This is where all the problems started.
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This post describes how to monitor logs in kubernetes with grafana and loki. This covers the use case of logging for troubleshooting purposes. That is, it allows analysing human readable logs coming from multiple systems in one aggregated log. Human readable logs are required for troubleshooting and optimization. It is the bare minimum of logging that is required.
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One part of the migration of my old setup to kubernetes is the migration of an old Jira 6.1 instance. Unfortunately, running that same jira instance in a container did not work because of licensing issues, and apparently it is impossible to get new licenses for such an old jira instance. Also it seems no longer possible to run Jira at home for open source projects and only cloud hosting may be used. A prerequisite for what follows is that you have a cloud instance of Jira running at atlassian cloud with a valid license (open source or commercial). The description is not exhaustive and you will need atlassian documentation and support to get the full picture, but this post tries to describe some of the essential steps in the migration.

Untortunately migrating directory from such an old Jira instance to Jira cloud is impossible and must be done in steps.
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As the last step of migration to kubernetes I am migrating my DLNA server to kubernetes. This will allow me to play content from my server on my TV. As part of my previous migration of the NAS I already migrated over all my data (including media) to kubernetes so this should be easy: just run a DLNA server on kubernetes and give it a mount of the media content. This new setup is going to replace my old mediatomb setup.

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As one of the last steps in moving my VM based setup at home to kubernetes, it is now the turn to migrate my ‘NAS’. The term ‘NAS’ is a too much honor for it since it is basically just a single shared file system exposed over SSHFS, Samba, and rsync. The setup discussed below however still supports multiple shares. Basically what I need from my NAS setup is the following:

• it must be accessible on Windows and linux
• efficient backups of important files must be possible using rsync (such as my complete home directory on linux)

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The migration of my old VM based infrastructure at home to k8s is almost finished. The final steps to do are:

• moving version control to kubernetes: subversion and git
• moving my file shares/NAS server
• hosting my DLNA server for playing movies from my server on my TV

This post describes the first. There are of course many free alternatives for hosting version control, but nonetheless, I like to be in control completely and therefore I am also hosting my own subversion and git repositories. These are basically just Apache using a certain configuration.

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As part of my project to move everything from VMs to kubernetes and to get rid of some really old VMs (talking OpenSuSE 11 from 2010 here), it is now time to migrate my old java applications to kubernetes. These apps are basic web apps but I am using some advanced stuff such as my own flexible JDBC realm database integration with Java EE and also using some tricky CDI things. The applications are stable and I even use one of them on almost a daily basis. However, I don’t want to spend time porting these apps over to a different environment. This is why a want to migrate this old (ancient) Glassfish V4 application server as is to Kubernetes.

The aim is to basically freeze this setup in time. I do not plan to work on these applications but I still use them. Instead of updating them at a later point in time, I would probably rewrite them from scratch and perhaps even in python instead of java using for instance django. Therefore, the aim is to freeze this setup in time as it were so I can keep on using it. No need to spend more time on it now. So this is going to get a little bit dirty.

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Up until now I have been running, a by now ancient, version of Jenkins on a virtual machine. The virtual machine on which it was running was so old that it was even unable to download any more newer artifacts from the internet because of its lack of support for the newer TLS versions. Time then, as part of my ongoing project to migrate everything to kubernetes, to move jenkins there as well.

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The final step in migrating ‘everything-email’ from my old server to a kubernetes setup is the migration of mailing lists based on mailman. In previous posts, I migrated the core mailserver and webmail to kubernetes. It s recommended to read the first post first because that one explains the full mail system architecture and dependencies. In this post we will be focusing on the last part, which is migrating mailman.

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