Welcome

Samuel Gay

• 2 min read
Welcome
My first proper Astrophotography session, with photo processing.

Hi, my name is Sam. I am starting this blog to try track my hobbies, and maybe share a little of the things I discover along the way. A list of some of the things that I like to occupy my time with:

  • Astrophotography | Photography
  • 3D printing
  • Miniature painting
  • Gaming
  • PC building
  • Antkeeping
  • Home networking | automation
  • Cat dad
  • Cluster building, kubernetes
  • Software engineering
  • Tiny house things
  • Travelling

I tend to rotate between hobbies, when there is a lull or I get bored. That might be explained by me being a bit spectrumy, or at least according to most of my friends who are neurodiverse (my friend fam).

I have a few things on the go at the moment. I'm partway through rebuilding my gaming PC, building an allsky camera, figure out how to use a Synology to orchestrate a cluster of raspberry pi's and maybe (just maybe) plan out a tiny house build.

Some of my recent successes include:

  • putting together a raspberry pi, to run step-ca for my local network, so my internal websites are all on acceptable ssl certificates
  • deploying acme.sh to my Synology NAS to pull ssl certs from my CA
  • setting up this blog, including lets encrypt certificates
  • start planning how to orchestrate a cluster of raspberry pis, using gitlab and ansible
    • setup a webhook for new dhcp leases to trigger an ansible script to ssh to the new node (test if it is using a known ssh user|pass and if successful, onboard it into the cluster management
    • onboarding, upgrade the OS to the latest, change the OS partitioning, create an overlay file system, change the OS layer to RO, and mount the overlay, mark the onboarded node as ready for a new role
    • ansible jobs to installed required software on the node according to the new role selected
    • an ansible job to reset the node, ssh to the node, wipe the overlay FS, change the root FS to RW, update | upgrade the OS, remount the root fs as RO and setup the overlay again, and put the node back into service, ready to be assigned to a new role.

You are welcome to check back later, I'll post semi regularly when I have news.