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Technical deep-dives into infrastructure, automation, and security — written from hands-on experience building and operating self-hosted systems.

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In Progress Apr 10 → May 10, 2026

Building a Proxmox Cluster on Switch Engines

Step-by-step guide to deploying a 3-node Proxmox VE cluster on Switch Engine VMs — from Debian 13 base install to HA clustering, VM migration, and cloud-init networking.

~18 min read
  • Proxmox
  • Virtualization
  • Switch Engine
  • Debian
Deploying ERPNext v16 on K3s: Challenges, Decisions, and Why Not Odoo Infrastructure
14 min read

Deploying ERPNext v16 on K3s: Challenges, Decisions, and Why Not Odoo

How I deployed a full ERPNext v16 ERP system on a resource-constrained K3s cluster — solving NFS storage, MariaDB secrets, Helm timeouts, and why ERPNext won over Odoo for self-hosted infrastructure.

  • ERPNext
  • Kubernetes
  • Helm
  • MariaDB
Secrets Management in a Self-Hosted Kubernetes Stack Security
9 min read

Secrets Management in a Self-Hosted Kubernetes Stack

How I manage secrets across Ansible Vault, 1Password, and Kubernetes — including the existingSecret pattern that fixed a critical PostgreSQL initialization bug.

  • Secrets
  • Ansible Vault
  • 1Password
  • PostgreSQL
Automating Infrastructure Health Checks with n8n Automation
10 min read

Automating Infrastructure Health Checks with n8n

Seven n8n workflows that monitor ArgoCD sync state, node health, pod CrashLoops, TLS certificate expiry, backup verification, disk usage, and send a daily infrastructure summary — all alerting via Signal.

  • n8n
  • Automation
  • Monitoring
  • Signal
Encrypted Backups to S3 with Restic: A Kubernetes Backup Strategy Security
11 min read

Encrypted Backups to S3 with Restic: A Kubernetes Backup Strategy

Why I chose restic over Velero and rclone, the CronJob-per-namespace pattern with pg_dump, S3 storage on SWITCHengines, push monitoring for backup health, and a real disaster recovery walkthrough.

  • Restic
  • Backup
  • S3
  • CronJob
Monitoring a K3s Cluster: Prometheus, Grafana, and Beyond Infrastructure
11 min read

Monitoring a K3s Cluster: Prometheus, Grafana, and Beyond

Deploying a full observability stack on K3s — kube-prometheus-stack for metrics and dashboards, Uptime Kuma for status pages, Glances for system-level monitoring, and Traefik dashboard for ingress visibility.

  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Uptime Kuma
  • Monitoring
GitOps with ArgoCD: From Zero to Auto-Syncing Deployments DevOps
10 min read

GitOps with ArgoCD: From Zero to Auto-Syncing Deployments

Setting up ArgoCD on K3s with server-side apply, connecting a GitLab Helm repo via SSH deploy key, and automating the full deployment pipeline from code push to production.

  • ArgoCD
  • GitOps
  • Helm
  • GitLab CI
Building a Production K3s Cluster from Scratch with Ansible Infrastructure
12 min read

Building a Production K3s Cluster from Scratch with Ansible

How I provisioned 3 VMs on Switch Engine, installed K3s, configured Traefik and cert-manager, hardened SSH, and joined worker nodes — all automated with Ansible playbooks.

  • K3s
  • Ansible
  • Traefik
  • cert-manager