blog.

  • Configuring Pi-hole v6 with a TLS certificate

    Pi-hole v6 was recently released and adds support for HTTPS. In /etc/pihole/pihole.toml under the webserver.tls configuration block, the documentation mentions that Pi-hole expects the certificate and the key in the same .pem file. Below is the relevant bit from pihole.toml At the time of writing I have not found an acme.sh deploy hook that would…

  • My 2025 updated approach to organizing photos

    Taking photos is fun, but organizing them might not be as much fun. Here is a snapshot of my approach to ingesting and organizing photos. Up 2022, when I ingest and work with photos, the photos from the camera would live in a folder named for the date when I took the photos, for example…

  • Running a reverse proxy to serve services on the Internet

    I have the occasional need to make a local/self-hosted service be reachable on the world wide web. However, I do not want to host them on my cloud VMs for reasons such as: Although the easy answer is to provision a bigger VM, I have a small Proxmox cluster that is more than capable of…

  • Onsite Stack Ansible Playbook

    I have just published an Ansible playbook to deploy a stack with Docker, PhotoPrism, Samba, Sanoid, and ZFS. This stack was deployed and used in January 2025. https://github.com/jonathanmtran/ais-onsite-stack Background For a retreat that took place in January 2025. I needed a server for the following functions: For the requirement of a file share, the obvious…

  • Create a metadata XMP sidecar file using exiftool

    I recently added a video from my phone into Immich, but it did not have the (approximate) correct date and time. Because I am leveraging Immich’s external library functionality and the Docker container’s mount point is read-only, Immich is unable to create the XMP sidecar. The following exiftool command creates an XMP sidecar file with…

  • Adding the VIQR input method to IBus

    To add the VIQR input method to IBus, install the ibus-table-others package. My setup is GNOME on Arch Linux, so the steps were as follows: Background When I need to type in Vietnamese, I use the VIQR input method because it was the method that made the most sense to me. The other popular method…

  • Clonezilla: “Box” is an unknown partition device

    I was looking for some files that were on my laptop before I erased it for re-partitioning (to GPT) and reinstalling. Luckily, I made an image of the drive using Clonezilla. When trying to restore the partition image to a disk (restoreparts) inside a VM, Clonezilla kept error-ing out after selecting the partition(s) to restore.…

  • Updating ESXi host using local patch zip file

    A Tweet from @ESXiPatches prompted me to update my ESXi 6.7.0 host. I enabled SSH and tried to update, but I got the popular message: $ esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.7.0-20220704001-standard \ -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml [OSError] [Errno 28] No space left on device Please refer to the log file for more details. This is not…

  • Proxmox VE and Let’s Encrypt with DNS-01 Validation

    One of the appealing reasons for using Proxmox VE as your hypervisor is that one can configure their system to obtain a TLS certificate for https from Let’s Encrypt on a regular basis. The Environment At the time of writing, I am running Proxmox VE version 7.2-4. The name of the node for this article…

  • can’t change attributes MNT_DEFEXPORTED already set for mount

    When restarting my TrueNAS (CORE) box, I got a few of the following errors for a few of my datasets: Apr 23 02:11:37 truenas 1 2022-04-23T02:11:37.549270+00:00 truenas.local mountd 1176 – – can’t change attributes for /mnt/tank/user/jmtran: MNT_DEFEXPORTED already set for mount 0xfffff8016cc87000 Apr 23 02:11:37 truenas 1 2022-04-23T02:11:37.549276+00:00 truenas.local mountd 1176 – – bad exports…