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Tim Wilkes

Tim Wilkes is a UK-based Enterprise Architect with over 25 years of experience in electronics, Linux, Security, and Unix systems administration.

🏗️ Building a Self-Healing HAProxy + Consul Cluster (and Everything That Went Wrong Along the Way)

How I replaced a routed /29 with a single dynamic IP and a proper HAProxy + Consul HA cluster, Terraform, Ansible, a WAF, and every mistake I made getting there, including the one where my own firewall blocked me for testing too much.

One Login to Rule Them All: Federating FreeIPA into Authentik

I spent a week bolting Authentik onto FreeIPA so I'd stop maintaining eleven separate logins. It went about as smoothly as you'd expect, which is to say: SELinux, IPv6 duplicate addresses, and a very confused Postgres role all had opinions.

The Great VOIP VLAN Shuffle (Or: How My ISP Quietly Ghosted My Phone System)

Moving my PBX onto a more structured VOIP VLAN ahead of a big IP renumbering seemed like sensible network hygiene. Then my ISP silently redirected inbound calls to the wrong address, never fixed it, and I ended up routing around it myself - one more reason to consider switching providers.

Photographing London from the BT Tower: My Time-Lapse Setup

Photographing London from the BT Tower was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Here's how I captured a full 360-degree time-lapse using a Canon DSLR, a 10-22mm wide-angle lens, an intervalometer, and a Mac.

Building Kali 2026.1 Images with Packer, Proxmox and Cloud-Init

Learn how to build fully automated Kali Linux 2026.1 Proxmox templates using Packer, cloud-init and a Debian preseed file. This guide covers the final working configuration after extensive troubleshooting and testing.

Automating an Attacking VM for Kubernetes Goat with Ansible and Kali Linux

Build an automated Kali Linux attacker VM for your Raspberry Pi Kubernetes Goat lab using cloud-init and Ansible to create a repeatable Kubernetes security testing environment.

Automating Kubernetes Goat on Raspberry Pi with Ansible

Learn how to fully automate Kubernetes Goat deployment on a Raspberry Pi K3s cluster using Ansible, Traefik, and K3s for rapid rebuilds and repeatable security labs.

Running Kubernetes Goat on a Raspberry Pi Cluster: Fun, Chaos, and Learning Kubernetes Security

Learn how to run Kubernetes Goat on a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster, expose vulnerable scenarios externally, and experiment with Kubernetes security in a safe home lab environment.

Setting Up a Raspberry Pi Cluster with ClusterHAT (Part 3: Kubernetes)

Learn how to deploy Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi ClusterHAT cluster using K3s and k3sup, configure shared NFS storage, label nodes, and deploy your first container workloads.

Setting Up a Raspberry Pi Cluster with ClusterHAT (Part 2: Ansible)

Learn how to configure Ansible for your Raspberry Pi ClusterHAT cluster, create inventories, run your first playbooks, and automate node management before deploying Kubernetes.