Blog - MattBits

I am wanting to tackle an issue with best practice in AWS - IAM policies and resource policies.

Homelab history I’ve been running some form of home infrastructure for a long time now.

Before I get into GitLab functions and components, I wanted to cover how I manage build and deployment artifacts, as it’s a dependency for a lot of what comes later.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve had a couple of things that have been annoyed me and have resulted in a learning and a success!

Having gotten an AMD AI 395+-based machine this month, I’ve been using Lemonade to run models, which takes care of bootstrapping RocM, I now wanted to bring this into a workflow I had been tested a couple of months ago which was toying around with making a

This is a summary of how I built and tuned a local OpenCode-style coding setup on AMD ROCm using Lemonade + llama.cpp, moving through multiple models, context issues, and performance tuning before settling on Gamma 26B A4B Instruct (IT). 1.

The beginning I’ve been running a Hashicorp stack for a while now - Vault, Consul and Nomad across a small cluster of machines.

This is a pledge to myself and for any one else interested in following the same journey.

My homelab and work life have followed very different trajectories, though often influencing one another.

What is this?

Homelab storage Over the past 15 years, my homelab has seen a biiiig variety of iterations and solutions, in somewhat of an order: Random desktop machine with a hard drive First actual servers, with local hard drives Home-built NAS with iSCSI for VMs (ESX…

In my work life, I’ve moved away from working in a team and into an IC role.

TL;DR: Profiling a Terraform provider revealed a performance bottleneck caused by repeated d.Get("task") calls inside a DiffSuppressFunc.

History Whilst at school and college, I loved running servers and bits and pieces.

For a while, I’ve been trying to get away from my previous VPN - OpenVPN.

To kick this off, I’ve not had a good way to host binaries generated during CI/CD.

History In my homelab setup, the way services are run are not the simplest of approaches and I often find this bites me - but every challenge is an opening for learning, which is always great (unless I just want something to work).

The Problem!

Dymamic Terraform Provider I wanted to create a proof-of-concept simple method of storing and retrieving data.

For Christmas last year, I wanted to make a present for my Mum.

Traefik’s ConsulCatalog plugin provides a defaultRule parameter, which is applied by default to exposed services.

Whilst implementing basic end-to-end tests for, an open source Terraform-cloud alternative, Terrarun (https://github.com/matthewJohn/terrarun), I need to deploy the Hashicorp Terraform cloud agent.

Gitlab Pipeline Templates For a while, I have built custom pipelines for my Gitlab projects, each starting from scratch and facing the same issues.

Pre-amble This blog post was written in-flight during a quest to create a secure deployment mechanism for Terraform projects to Vault, Consul and Nomad.

Homelab monitoring I currently use Icinga2 (with Icinga Director) to monitoring internal homelab machines, services, as well as external VPSes and external services.

Background I maintain a handful of open sources projects - most of which are of no interest to anyone.

AWS offers a broad variety of services - some of which are essential and unavoidable when using Amazon as a cloud provider.

Goals I started off with a basic goal - host a small python website, which uses a MySQL-like database on a highly available cluster.

Tinc appears to be one of the few open source mesh VPNs and, in my expierience, once working, performs incredible well.