Earlier on I've shown you how I run docker containers on NAS using systemd. This time, I'll show you an easy way to configure systemd with Ansible that will get you running containers in no time. (and in reproducible and automated way)

Has science gone too far? It might look so, because:

1. It feels like a huge over-engineering to implement CI at home.
2. What would you integrate anyway?
3. Just why?

Well let me explain my reasons.

As I've mentioned before, I'm using HP Microserver Gen8 as a small home NAS. There is a lot of stuff stored there, but the primary reason why I actually started using NAS (back then slow, but hackable D-link DNS-323) was to store my photo collection. With ZFS, mirrored drives and extra backup to off-site location, the data on it should be reasonably safe, right? However that's not all that useful if most of the recent photos reside on the SD card inside the camera on in the case somewhere, just because I didn't have time to copy them to the NAS yet. So what can we do about it if we have 15 minutes to spare? Let's automate it a bit!

It all started with tripped breaker. In fact it tripped multiple times before I got home. Luckilly the spinning rust drives with data survived that without any issues, but the flash drive didn't. So with system FUBAR and some (little) time on my hands, there's only one thing to do - upgrade.

Motivation🔗

Chances are, you never heard about Xymon (formely Hobbit), so let me give you some idea. It's actually pretty decent monitoring system - if you still live in 90s. :D But hey, let's give credit where it's due, compared to other systems at that time, it was reasonably fast, has quite easy to understand configuration, comes with many standard checks out of the box and comes with a web interface. Probably that's why some people still use it to this day.

In our company it's one of those legacy systems, that we need to replace, so as a first step, let's see if we can get some of the data out while we're still using it.