Full Aware Professional techno-tinkerer

How to structure ArgoCD

This is a great reference for understanding the App of Apps model for deployment with ArgoCD. How to Structure Your Argo CD Repositories Using Application Sets post by Kostis Kapelonis

Managing multiple Kubernetes contexts

Keep all INDIVIDUAL kubeconfig.yaml files under .kube/contexts

.kube/contexts
├── k8scluster1.yaml
└── k8scluster2.yaml

Then put the following line in your .bashrc (Linux) or .bash_profile (MacOS)

export KUBECONFIG=${HOME}/.kube/config:$(for YAML in $(find ${HOME}/.kube/contexts -name '*.yaml') ; do echo -n ":${YAML}"; done)

MongoDB Proper Kubernetes installation with Helm

Overview

In a previous post I created my own MongoDB deployment and installed with Kustomize. Let’s use the “official” Bitnami Helm Chart to install MongoDB.

Get location information by IP address

Author Ashutosh Krishna created the following post that easily illustrates how to gather location information by IP address using Python.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-get-location-information-of-ip-address-using-python/

Complexity kills

Before designing your next microservices architecture, consider this brilliant post by Andrei Taranchenko Death by a Thousand Microservices

MongoDB Kubernetes Deployment

Overview

While writing Tagging Asteroids with MongoDB I was able to quickly provision a cluster on the free tier of MongoDB Atlas. What I originally wanted was to quickly stand up a MongoDB instance in my Kubernetes environment but found most documentation too complex for my usecase. Just give me a MongoDB “dialtone” as quickly as possible without having to install the binaries on my system.

Tagging Asteroids with MongoDB

Objective

Let’s use MongoDB to build an asteroid tagging engine that allows us to assign multiple elements to any asteroid then query based on those elements.

Firefox: The WidevineCdm plugin has crashed

Firefox 108.0.1 (64-bit) - “The WidevineCdm plugin has crashed”

While studying for my CKAD on Udemy over the holidays I encountered this error when attempting to open ANYTHING that had DRM protected video; Udemy, Netflix, Hulu, etc. Some recommended fixes included maintaining a separate firefox binary. Luckily I found the fix on AskUbuntu.com

Pi-Hole Wildcard DNS

In order to access Kubernetes applications via my ingress projectcontour.io, I’ll use a wildcard DNS entry.

Unfortunately this isn’t a simple entry in the web UI for Pi-hole (yet?). A quick search and Brandon Rozek had documented the steps to add a wildcard DNS entry in dnsmasq.

Homelab

Objective

To have a single server with enough power to run nested vSphere 8 and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with NSX. But with vSphere 8 I wanted to make sure I had something on the HCL. Dell PowerEdge R740 will carry the homelab moving forward.