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 Online resources on setting up NixOS on Contabo are scarce and can be clunky or outdated.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.

As far as downtimes go, most suck. Then there are some that are more like happy little opportunities to learn something new. When Gitlab in my homelab started returning 500s, I had no idea how blessed I was. I was at best annoyed.

Looking at my git history, I've been happily running InfluxDB for years. However nearing the end of 2021, after long time of peaceful coexistence among my monitoring services, some more or less pressing problems emerged:

• The long-term future of InfluxDB 1.x is uncertain, it's pretty clear that I'll have to migrate to 2.x in foreseeable future.
• Memory usage becomes a bit problematic. Well, that's quite an understatement. The container ran out of memory frequently and I had to bump up the limit couple times already. Despite that, I can't even graph longer time spans without getting InfluxDB OOM killed and it's at this stage by far the most memory intensive service I ran. There are presumably some improvements in InfluxDB 2.x that could help here.

The solution seems pretty obvious, however in the end this post isn't really about InfluxDB.

In my homelab I use LXD/LXC quite a bit. Linux containers provide pretty decent alternative to full blown virtualization with smaller overhead and some extra perks like easier local filesystem access. All things considered, I’ve been happy with LXD for many years.

However there are places where the illusion of completely separated virtual machines shows some cracks when you look close enough. This is a story of one such crack that was haunting me for months.