Hi, I’m Eugene 馃憢

Welcome to my personal blog! I’m an infrastructure automation enthusiast.

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A person looking at a monitor with the Raspberry Pi logo and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W device in it. There is a camera in the top left pointed at the person.

Step Up Your Home Security Game on the Cheap With A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Powered IP Camera Monitor

Not too long ago I set up a few IP cameras around the house. As I work mostly from home, I wanted a non-proprietary and cost effective way to monitor four video feeds at any time while I鈥檓 in my study. This blog post details the solution I came up with, which leverages a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and an old monitor I had lying around. Before blindly following the instructions in this post, please consider the caveats!...

March 23, 2024 路 8 min 路 Eugene de Beste
A match made in heaven?

When WSL Fails You: Mounting ext4 Linux Partitions on Windows When They're on the Same Drive as C:

I鈥檓 one of the (probably) few people that still dual-boot Windows and Linux. There are plenty things that are easier for me to do on a Linux host rather than in Windows, even with WSL being quite useful these days. An example of this is virtualization related experiments (specifically with Qemu/KVM). A little while back I started writing an upcoming blog post while booted into Linux and took some screenshots that I wanted to use for it....

March 21, 2024 路 4 min 路 Eugene de Beste
Images of Tools and Technologies Used For This Blog.

Automated and Dynamic Raspberry Pi Provisioning For The Lazy Homelabber Featuring Canonical MAAS and Python

Raspberry Pi鈥檚 are great little devices for various purposes. I鈥檝e got a couple of Pi4鈥檚 for my homelab. That said, you鈥檇 probably be lying to me if you told me you were enthusiastic about the following scenario, especially if you make a lot of changes and/or try a lot of different operating system versions: Unplug Pi Remove storage device (SD/SSD) Plug storage device into PC Flash OS image to device Unplug device from PC Plug back into Pi Plug Pi back in Configure Pi after it boots I developed a solution for my homelab which allows me to re-provision my Pis on demand using a more traditional remote-provisioning paradigm, without having to touch any of them....

March 10, 2024 路 13 min 路 Eugene de Beste
Ubuntu Login Prompt That Says Login Failed.

Accelerate Cinder Volume Imports in OpenStack By Avoiding Glance

If you鈥檝e ever had to export and move volumes from one OpenStack cloud to another, you may know the following process: converting a Cinder volume to a Glance image to allow you to download it so that the reverse process can be applied when importing it. This is obviously a laborious process, especially if there are a ton of volumes to port. I recently had to do a bulk import of more than 100 volumes in qcow2 format for a client migrating to our cloud....

March 4, 2024 路 2 min 路 Eugene de Beste
Ubuntu Login Prompt That Says Login Failed.

Recovering Cloud Virtual Machine Access without GRUB (QEMU/OpenStack)

Context A client reached out to me a little while ago to ask if it was possible to recover access to a VM that one of his clients use. This Ubuntu 22.04 based VM runs on our OpenStack cloud, powered by QEMU/KVM. The client鈥檚 client had made some modifications to /etc/ssh/sshd_config and subsequently locked themselves out of the machine. It鈥檚 important to note here that cloud instances (VMs) typically don鈥檛 include a default password set and rely solely on key-pair authentication via SSH....

March 3, 2024 路 6 min 路 Eugene de Beste