It’s been an interesting and somewhat productive few months. I’m now running two xcp-ng hosts, one of which is my previously beefy workstation now a beefy machine dedicated to virtualization. I’ve stood up hosts for Kasm Workspaces, Hashicorp Vault, and Apache Airflow.
Airflow I’m familiar with having used it in my day job for a few years now (first via open source helm, now via MWAA), but it’s been fun finding ways to integrate it into my home lab.
Vault won’t be replacing my existing password storage infrastructure anytime soon, but I did enjoy integrating it with Airflow and Azure. It’s also been a great way to do internal cert creation and management. Expecting I’ll be working on more automation involving Vault and my other home lab tools.
Kasm I haven’t actually spent much time with other than the initial setup and exploration. I thought I might have a use for it, or it could be something to share with family. For myself I don’t have much use for temporary virtual environments, and things like ephemeral web browser or other random application sessions aren’t just something I need. I’ll keep the host around for a bit, try to remember to update it on occasion, but truthfully it might just get tossed in the next 3-6 months when I do a round of cleanup.
I picked up an M4 Mac mini and have been loving it. There have been a few odd quirks, like network randomly dropping out and having to reboot to fix it, but each update has seen that happen less and less (hoping it’ll be gone with the 15.2 update). I splurged for the Pro version of the chip, more memory and storage, but that was something I went into with eyes wide open and I don’t regret it. Plays WoW and BG3 like a dream, and for my other games the Parsec experience is much improved from the MacBook Pro 2017 I had previously been using. Everything else, well, it’s just so damn fast.
What’s next for me? Well, I have some work to do on the show platform I manage for my wife, a few enhancements and fixes for the upcoming 2025 show season. Now that I have a machine that can actually run Xcode I want to dabble in iOS development again, explore some idea’s that have been stacking up the past few years. I want to automate more of my home lab, mostly around the management and maintenance of the hosts I create so I don’t have to worry about being behind on bug and security fixes. There are some open source projects I’m a frequent user of that I’d like to contribute back to, but that’s lower on the list.
As for time, well, the struggle is real as they say. I want to play my games, including WoW which I’m solidly back into as of the most recent expansion, but I also want to do another play through of BG3 and Cyberpunk 2077. Spending time with the family is key, of course, and top priority. Shuffling the gaming and family time in with the home lab work is where things get tricky. Mostly, unless there is a family commitment, I’ll do what I feel like doing in the moment, flexibility is good for my health and sanity.
I think that’s all for now.
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