I've been tinkering with ESPHome recently, trying to add some air quality sensors to my household. There's a lot of good tutorials out there, but they almost universally have one thing in common: they assume that the end goal is Home Assistant integration.

Which is cool piece of software, but I don't have any use for it right now. All I want is to monitor few air quality parameters, send the metrics to metrics DB and render nice graphs in Grafana which I already have for monitoring other stuff.

Previously, I wrote about my favorite home lab metrics DB. This time I wan to talk about another component of monitoring stack - about log aggregation.

Spoiler: this post is going to be about Grafana Loki and how the promise of cost effectiveness and ease of operation works really well in the unique environment of home lab and small self-hosted networks.

The man page says that sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser or another user, as specified by the security policy. However most of the sudo use that I've seen/done is really a privilege escalation with switched user being just a consequence of that. Even the famous XKCD 🥪 webcomic shows sudo being used in this way. Most of the time this small difference does not really matter, but sometimes it's really inconvenient.

This is mostly a note I've written for my self so that I can quickly recall how to sudo when I really only want to do something without the su part. Let's have a look at another less popular but sometimes quite a bit more appropriate option.

Contabo is an EU-based VPS provider with reasonably affordable pricing. However, it does come with some compromises. The billing structure is monthly with a setup fee, making it more suitable for specific workloads. Another limitation is the limited official OS support, specifically the absence of NixOS as an option. Online resources on setting up NixOS on Contabo are scarce and can be clunky or outdated. Here's my approach that's hopefully easy to follow.

Outside of very specific deployments and industries, serial port on a modern hardware - if present - is usually overlooked and completely ignored. Over the years it became the floppy of external ports. These days one is more likely to see it as an icon representing I/O port than to physically use it.

Which is exactly why I also didn't see it for what it was - a simple, yet elegant solution to my particular problem. Because as it turns out, serial port still has much to offer even in 2023.