Latest from Hamzah & Marissa
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About M. Hamzah Khan — Senior DevOps Engineer
I’m Hamzah Khan (M. Hamzah Khan) — self-proclaimed genius, ruler of the Internet, and Senior DevOps Engineer the rest of the time. I’m based in London, UK, and I’ve been working in Linux systems and infrastructure for over 15 years.
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My Home Lab — Network, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure
My home lab is a platform for running infrastructure I actually use, experimenting with technologies I work with professionally, and self-hosting services I’d rather not hand to third parties. The design philosophy mirrors production engineering: infrastructure as code, GitOps for state management, full observability, and automation wherever possible. The core of the current setup is a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster managed with FluxCD, backed by a VyOS router, Proxmox hypervisors, and a full Grafana observability stack.
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Playing with Mastodon, the Open Source, Federated Social Network
I recently started playing with Mastodon, an open source, Twitter-like social network. In the past, I’ve looked at StatusNet (now known as GNU Social), but at the time it did not seem very intuitive, and had a number of problems which I cannot remember any more. So far I have been using Mastodon for almost a month, and while the community is very small, I’m finding myself using it more than I do Twitter (or any other social media platform for that matter).
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Athan / Adhan Prayer Time Notifications on Google Home via Home Assistant
Update I recently migrated my blog from WordPress to Hugo. Due to this migration, the comments that were originally on this post are not present. I hope to migrate them over soon..
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Growing Date Palms from Seed
Recently my auntie gave me some Ajwah date fruit she got while she was in Medina in Saudi Arabia. I absolutely love dates and have always heard that dates have a lot of health benefits. While I was enjoying my dates, I decided to Google what the health benefits actually are.
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Cisco ASA 9.2 on Cisco ASA 5505 with Unsupported Memory Configuration Fail
Update 16th November 2015 - It looks like it now works. I am currently running asa924-2-k8.bin on my 5505s, with my 1GB sticks of RAM, and it hasn’t complained! 🙂 The Cisco ASA 5505 officially supports a maximum of 512MB RAM.
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Securing Your Postfix Mail Server with Greylisting, SPF, DKIM and DMARC and TLS
A few months ago, while trying to debug some SPF problems, I came across “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance” (DMARC). DMARC basically builds on top of two existing frameworks, Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). SPF is used to define who can send mail for a specific domain, while DKIM signs the message.
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Home Lab: Added a Cisco 3845 ISR
Why? Well, I wanted more ISRs in my home lab. That, plus my ISP (Virgin Media), will be upgrading my line from 120 Mb/s to 152 Mb/s in the second half of 2014.
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Home Lab Network Redesign Part 2: The Edge Routers
As I have never used a Mikrotik router before, there was quite a big learning curve. I’ve only really used Cisco/Juniper like interfaces to configure routers, and I’m a fan of them. Even though I have gotten a little more used to the RouterOS command line, I must say I’m not a huge fan of it.
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Home Lab Network Redesign Part 1: The Remote Dedicated Server
As promised, here is a very very basic diagram of my home lab. This is quite a high level overview of it, and the layer 2 information is not present as I suck at Visio, and all the connectors were getting messy on Visio with the layer 2 stuff present! What is not shown in the digram: There are two back-to-back links between the edge routers which are in an active-passive bond.
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Home Lab Network Redesign with Mikrotik Routers
I currently have two cable connections from Virgin Media coming into my house due to some annoying contract problems while moving. I originally had one line on the 60 Mb/s package, and the other on 100 Mb/s, but when Virgin Media upgraded me to 120 Mb/s I downgraded the 60 Mb/s line to 30 Mb/s to reduce costs. Since I got into this strange arrangement with Virgin Media, I have been using two separate routers for the connections.
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Connecting to Usenet via Two Internet Connections
I currently have two connections from Virgin Media at home and I wanted to use them both to grab content from usenet. My Usenet provider is Supernews, I’ve used them for a couple of months, and from what I understand they are actually just rebranded product of Giganews. Supernews only actually allow you to connect to their servers from one IP per account, so even if I had set up load balancing to split connections over both my connections, it would not have worked very well for usenet as I will be going out via two IP addresses, so for this reason I decided to take another route.
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Two more Cisco 7204 VXRs Added to My Home Lab!
Last week, I was browsing eBay (as you do!), and noticed two Cisco 7204 VXR routers auctions which were about to end pretty soon and the starting bid was £0.99, and there were no current bids! I’ve wanted to play with the bigger Cisco routers for a while. I have played with the Cisco ISRs, which are designed more for branch/smaller offices.
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Cisco ASA 5505 RAM Upgrade to 1GB (Beyond the Official 512MB Limit)
Info 3rd June 2014 - If you are reading this post, you should check out my follow up post: Cisco ASA 9.2 on Cisco ASA 5505 with Unsupported Memory Configuration Fail I have two Cisco ASA 5505s in my home lab which I acquired almost two years ago from eBay. I was pretty lucky, as I paid under £70 for each because the seller wasn’t too sure what they were! Looking on eBay now, they are selling for around £120!
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