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.

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

Gitlab pipelines

As a later post will show, I've been using gitlab pipelines to validate some of my code for me. As a security conscious person, I've been interested in building security in to pipelines.

eMotion and Modbus

As I write this, Paul Hibbert released this video on youtube 3 days ago. The video features a very smart sensor doing presence detection. The company linknlink were new to me and following the recommendation from Paul, I bought a couple of eMotion sensors.

M5stack Echo with a hex light

With all my playing around with home assistant, I've bought myself a M5stack Echo. The echo is the variant of choice for home assistant's "Year of the voice". The other day, I did come across a 37 led array in the shape of a hexagon on Aliexpress.

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]

If you've found a post helpful, consider supporting the blog - it's a part-time passion that your support helps keep alive.