Matt Horan's Blog

Anyone who has lived in New York City is likely familiar with steam heat. Many buildings in the city are fitted with steam heat, and in Manhattan, ConEd even provides district steam to some buildings. Heat in these buildings is generally controlled by a central thermostat which often results in overheating. Many New Yorkers resort to simply opening their windows to control the heat. This was a practice that became common during the 1918 flu pandemic. However, there’s a less wasteful alternative to controlling steam heat. Thermostatic radiator valves have been common in Europe for years but are far less common in the United States. Combined with the Shelly TRV and Home Assistant, I’m able to reliably control the heat of my apartment throughout the winter.

Read more...

I’ve been interested in energy monitoring for some time. Growing up, my dad worked at General Electric in their meter division. I always got to play with electric meters and found them fascinating. At one point he even brought home a meter and we built a housing so that I could measure the electricity usage of an attached electrical socket! Energy monitoring has gotten a lot simpler these days, and Shelly has a bunch of easy to use devices that I’ve written about previously.

Read more...

There’s a joke among sysadmins: it’s always DNS. DNS is an integral part of the modern internet. It often works and therefore nobody ever thinks about it. But when it doesn’t work, weird things happen — and nobody ever thinks about DNS. Even when they know it’s always DNS. Recently I had my own “it’s always DNS” moment, and I figured I’d share my experience here so that maybe you’ll remember: it’s always DNS.

Read more...

For many years I’ve been using mutt to read and send email. I stumbled across a post about how to hook up Vim and Goobook to autocomplete Google Contacts when composing email. The original Vim plugin called out to additional programs to transform Goobook output to the format appropriate for Vim autocompletion. Wanting to learn more about Vimscript I decided to port as much as possible over to native Vimscript. Read on to learn more about how to get this set up for yourself!

Read more...

As I wrote in my last post about setting up a remote door buzzer, Shelly’s WiFi-enabled relays caused me to catch the home automation bug. In addition to the relay used for that project, I picked up a Shelly 1PM relay (and bought four more since then!) A fellow espresso enthusiast told me about their Home Assistant setup to estimate how many espresso shots they could pull before needing to restock on beans. Having limited space at my coffee station, I wanted something compact. I’ve been using TPLink Kasa devices with power metering elsewhere in my home, but the Shelly 1PM was the prefect choice for this project since it could be tucked away in the junction box.

Read more...

Over a year ago I bought a Shelly 1 relay with grand plans: set up a remote door buzzer for my apartment. I live in an apartment building with an intercom system (see below.) The front door can be unlocked from a central control panel in my apartment. However, I’m not always in the living room where the control panel is located when someone calls my apartment. Also, sometimes I’m at the front door and my keys are inaccessible. Since I don’t have a fancy remote controlled door opener, I wanted to come up with my own solution.

Read more...

Prior to migrating from Cacti to Prometheus for infrastructure monitoring, I’d already been using Prometheus for blackbox monitoring. A couple of years ago I was looking for a way to monitor the health of various services I had deployed across virtual machines and containers running on my home network. I had used Pingdom for this in the past, but they killed their free plan in 2019. I had quite a few services to monitor, including multiple Web servers, a mail server, IRC server, and more. I surveyed the hosted service landscape but the available free options didn’t support the variety of services I needed to monitor; and the paid services cost as much as a single VPS at ARP Networks.

Read more...

I’ve been using Cacti to monitor infrastructure for nearly 20 years. Cacti is a great tool for polling devices via SNMP and renders pretty graphs via RRDtool. However, I’ve been trying to consolidate infrastructure and have settled on Kubernetes (specifically, Google Kubernetes Engine) for running as much of my infrastructure as possible. While it’d be possible to run Cacti on Kubernetes, I wanted to find another option that was more “Kubernetes native”.

Read more...

I’ve been using Let’s Encrypt to manage certificates on my systems for some time now. I started off using the excellent acme-client, which has  since been integrated into OpenBSD. Previously, there was a portable version which had been ported to FreeBSD, but this is no longer maintained. I continued running it for some time without realizing this. Fortunately the FreeBSD port has since been removed.

Read more...

In an effort to better understand Kubernetes, the need to stand up monitoring infrastructure, and the desire to reduce the burden of maintaining a MySQL instance, I decided to check out Google’s GKE offering. As I’d be using this for hosting personal projects, I wanted to keep the cost as low as possible. This, plus latency to my ARP Networks VPSes, is why I chose GKE over other cloud providers.

Read more...