blog.

  • Things Learned While Rebuilding My Proxmox Cluster

    I have (somewhat) rebuilt my Proxmox cluster and learned a couple things while doing so: an approach to migrating VMs/containers to a new cluster and renaming storage pools.

  • Unable to play audio on GNOME and Firefox

    A while ago I was unable to play audio on GNOME and Firefox running on Arch Linux. When I tried to play a video on YouTube, the video would just pause. To get things immediately working was to toggle my audio devices from the onboard audio interface to an external audio interface and then back…

  • wAP ax 5 GHz Wi-Fi not appearing on devices

    Recently, I picked up a MikroTik wAP ax access point because I wanted something that is not UniFi. Out of the box, the 5 GHz Wi-Fi was not visible to most devices at my place including a Pixel 3a, iPhones, and ThinkPads. On the other hand, my Pixel 7a connected without issue. Strange …

  • Binding container port(s) to a specific IP address

    By default, when one publishes a port for a container, all interfaces (IP addresses) listen for traffic on that port. There may be instances where we only want to publish the port on a specific IP address.

  • Containerizing my PHP application from the 2010s

    I have a PHP application I started writing back in 2010 and worked on it until 2016. Years later, I want to containerize the application since that is what we do. Also, I want to revisit the application and make some improvements. When I first started the project, the development landscape was a lot different…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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…