Prakhar Shukla

Automation

Availability Tracking with Uptime Kuma

I manage quite a lot of different infrastructure types, and while in most cases I prefer something more robust, like container health with extensive logging tools and Grafana monitors and alerts. However I needed something quicker and less complicated for my home lab, as many things are ephemeral, plus the

Machine Learning

Free Image ML Generation on Apple Silicon

So I was recently discussing with a friend, and topic of MidJourney came up. And he mentioned how he'd seen some interesting posts on twitter with generated images and wanted to use AI generated images as image content for his blog. So I realized that apparently it is

Machine Learning

FauxPilot: A decent OSS alternative

I wanted to have Github CoPilot features but on the cheap-side. I already had tried out multiple others code generation models and had an idea, maybe I can write a new backend by copying the request format of the CoPilot plugin, thus using the VS Code plugin as-is. But like

Malware

Some malware from my Honeypot

So I've been running my HoneyPot for many months now, and I do analysis on some samples from time to time. Following are 2 interesting scripts. While one is clearly a tool to demonstrate an attack, now being used in the wild, the other one is a simple

Hardware

LED Patterns on Raspberry Pi

I use a lot of Raspberry Pis (4B, 3B, 3A, Zero W, etc) and I use them mostly headless. And while I do have a monitoring setup, I always thought that it would be nicer if I could map the default LEDs to something more useful. And guess what, it

Networking

Pimox7 Networking Issue

So I love Proxmox for my local lab and ever since I used them on my x86_64 nodes, I wanted the same experience for my Raspberry Pis as well. And it turned out that a very famous project by the name of Pimox7 is quite good at it as

Cloud

Ansible Semaphore

I've a home lab and with time my inventory has grown quite a bit. And I started automating some basic tasks using Ansible scripts. And it was great except for 2 things: 1. Automating this to run automatically on a schedule. 2. Have a GUI dashboard to review

IDS/IPS on OpenWRT using Snort3

If you've configured networks or read about network security, you're probably familiar with IDS and IPS. In short IDS (Instrusion Detection System) allows you to know something strange is happening in your network, while IPS (Instrusion Prevention System) helps you in preventing it. You can find

Proxmox

NVIDIA GPU & Proxmox

If you've wondered ever why is it easy to create abstractions like Virtual CPU, RAM, Disk, but not GPU and get equivalent performance? Indeed I did. Why is it that for GPUs the standard tutorials suggested to simply pass through the entire GPU (using PCIe Passthrough) or simply

Docker

Cross Platform Docker Builds

Given the recent prominence of ARM64, Docker images lately need to be built for two flavours and this may even expand more in future RISC-V. However tooling behind this has been really complicated until recently, where people needed to configure and use specific builders, which was pretty complicated stuff. However

Networking

pfSense and PPPoE

pfSense is perhaps not a good idea for most home networks Being in IoT industry as a tech guy means that you'll definitely get exposed to networking a lot. And one of the debates that essentially comes up is using OpenWRT vs pfSense. Following is a summary of

Networking

GKE Wireguard VPC Peering

I'd read many blogs on how to connect a GKE cluster with Wireguard VPN (bidirectional connectivity) over a private network. And it turned out to be a fairly niche usecase, such that the documentation to follow the steps were not very clear, and hence this is my attempt

Docker

Docker, AppArmor & LXC

As discussed in the previous post, I use a Proxmox setup, where I rely heavily on LXC containers with nested Docker containers as workloads. And recently, Docker released a new update where AppArmor is enabled by default for docker, docker compose etc. which was crashing unless using privileged containers. After

Docker

Docker and AppArmor

My setup relies heavily on Docker containers running inside LXC containers, which run on Proxmox. While this setup is for mostly personal use, it gives me good utilisation for my low cost infrastructure. However, recently Docker-CE pushed an update that broke nested containers for me. In fact google-ing around quickly

Docker

Multiline Refactor in Dockerfile

I'm sure you're used to doing multiline refactors in GUI or even CLI based editors quite easily. And I used to think that it would be indeed that simple to do the same in a Dockerfile using the basic utilities present in NIX. However after my

NVIDIA

Folding @ Home on TX2

Let me clarify first that this post is not about running GPU enabled folding. For that, some hardware enablement is missing, and thus it'll be really hard to port it, though I may attempt that in future. For CPU performance, TX2 packs decent power, specially with 2 Denver

Proxmox

Why I love OpenZFS

First of all, let me clarify that this post uses OpenZFS, but the technology marvel that it is is based on ZFS, which is something that I truly appreciate. However the original implementation of ZFS was built for BSD Solaris with some license concerns, but OpenZFS clearly integrated with Linux

Edge

TX2 Hashing Performance

I recently got 3 TX2(s) donated to me by my friend Sri Krishna Acharya. I did flash it using a comprehensive tutorial provided by him plus slight modifications using an old Macbook Pro running Ubuntu 18.04 (so many NVIDIA quirks here, that this deserves it own blog post)

Cloud

GKE Autopilot Sucks

I am a big fan of GCP, and was quite excited to shift to GKE Autopilot. While I am pretty familiar with creating my own clusters with Kubespray or using off-the-shelf GCP with Managed Node Pools, I wanted Autopilot, because the workload that I was dealing with had a fluctation

Networking

MTU Issues and Fixes

I've published multiple blogs on my ISP setup and how it has annoyed me in the past. However this one is laser focused on one attribute: MTU. You can read more about it here. Basically it is a balancing act, where optimal performance values are higher MTU, but

Edge

PLC4x Server Docker Build

Recently I was working on PLC4X and needed to use the tools provided under PLC4J in a Dockerfile. At the time of writing this, the tagged release v0.10.0 fails to build the Dockerfile present in the root of repository. So I built a gist based on some quickly

News

Hello World

I had a blog hosted on Medium, but since that hosting became too annoying, I've shifted to Ghost to publish all my further work, as well as to act as my primary website. Thank you for reading.

Networking

BSNL is a terrible ISP

I moved to Kochi before pandemic, and since then sort of got stuck here. But it has been a great time considering the situation, except for the internet. And I wholly blame BSNL for it. I live on 20th Floor, which means that phone signal is quite weak. To add

Networking

Mirai Botnet in 2021

Following my post [https://blog.prakharshukla.com/honeypot-running-off-a-pi-zero-w-d86a03edc63a] about the HoneyPot, and this port is about one of those attacks. While Mirai is no more the hot news, the most number attacks, albeit I hope mostly useless, start from this simple bot. In fact, this is the list of unique

Edge

Onion Omega as a Fan Controller

Final setup, up close.I’m a really big fan of passive cooling rather than active cooling. In fact, as much as possible, I also prefer air cooling over water cooling. Not that I like to run my chips hot, it’s just that I don’t like the noise