Automation

Welcome to the Automation section of PHP Systems Blog. Here you’ll find guides, projects, and experiments in making technology work for you - from home automation with Raspberry Pi and Home Assistant to workflow orchestration with Kestra and Ansible. I share practical setups, real-world configs, and the lessons learned while automating my own systems.

Automating Ansible playbooks with Kestra

Recently, after watch Christian Lempa videos, I have started playing about with Kestra. Kestra is a work flow orcestration platform to schedule playbooks or tirgger them when I want them. Example using unpackerr.

Fixing booting issues with LVM

Earlier this yaer, I bought a Firebat N100 pc to add to my proxmox cluster. The device itself is great. Apart from when updating, it sometimes reboots. Recently, this reboot was while the kernel was being updated.

Living without Wifi

Recently, while my son was on half term my unifi Power Over Ethernet (POE) switch decided to give up the ghost. It may even have let out the magic smoke. This switch was an 8 port 150W POE device. Not the biggest device I have for networking, but it was the one that did POE.

Proxmox, LXC and Terraform

Even before Broadcom appeared to be doing it's best to kill off VMWare, I've been looking to migrate from VMWare to Proxmox. I already have 2 Proxmox nodes, and just have one last node to migrate, along with 1 VM. I have been migrating for a while and the import tool seems to work very well.

Deploying vault via docker and ansible

Adding to my in-promptu series on automating docker containers with ansible, this time I'm looking at Hashicorp's Vault. This is slightly different, in that it required a binary to be installed on the ansible controller (a raspberry pi). Once vault is deployed, we need to unseal the containter.

Monitoring DMARC with Docker

In this post, I deploy a docker container via docker compose and ansible to read my dmarc reports.

Using ansible to deploy a gitlab runner.

After deploying watchtower to one of my docker instances, I noticed that it was having issues with restarting the container. The actual fault turned out to be the networking with portainer, but in the meantime, I wrote an ansible playbook to redeploy / restart the container.

Deploying Plex with docker and ansible

Homepage + Docker + Gitlab + Ansible

I was watching TechnoTim recently with his video about homepage. Homepage is a dashboard for all your home lab links. If you have used heimdall before, it is similar, but all the configuration is in yaml.

FaaS and Gitlab

I have been messing around with Gitlab and FaaS for

About the author

Tim Wilkes is a UK-based security architect with over 15 years of experience in electronics, Linux, and Unix systems administration. Since 2021, he's been designing secure systems for a telecom company while indulging his passions for programming, automation, and 3D printing. Tim shares his projects, tinkering adventures, and tech insights here - partly as a personal log, and partly in the hopes that others will find them useful.

Want to connect or follow along?

LinkedIn: [phpsytems]
Twitter / X: [@timmehwimmy]
Mastodon: [@timmehwimmy@infosec.exchange]

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