Having a central place to view or search through server logs is awesome. I’ve used Graylog in the past, but I’ve always felt it was a bit cumbersome to set up and use — and it felt overkill for my need.

Instead I gave Grafana Loki and Promtail a try 👇

I have a local mail server with Postfix and Dovecot — I use it as a local SMTP smart host, and “notification center”.

While gathering information for this post; I discovered that my file server have been sending me emails, warning me of S.M.A.R.T. errors on a disk in the ZFS pool. Every day — since September!

So I’ve included a section on how to avoid missing important server emails.

I’m using a Raspberry Pi to communicate with the power equipment in my homelab rack; the UPS, ATS and PDU. For the UPS, I’m using NUT (Network UPS Tools), and for the ATS and PDU; my own PowerWalker Python library.

In this post I’ll be going through how I’ve set up the NUT server to communicate with my PowerWalker VI 1500 RT HID UPS, and NUT clients running on all other physical machines in the rack.

I recently started upgrading my servers and containers to Ubuntu 20.04. I made three Ansible playbooks to get information about which hosts I needed to update.