This past week, I reconfigured my home server to address some issues with the partition scheme. I also used this process as an opportunity to convert most of my bespoke configurations to IaC using Ansible . This was also the first time I took on a large DevOps project with the assistance of ChatGPT. The Ansible project has some great documentation complete with multiple examples of how to use each module, but because the options, and sometimes the syntax, of each modules differs, the process of automating the configuration of a complex server can be a time intensive process of hunting through many pages of documentation looking for the exact syntax of an ansible task so you can move on to automating the next task.

I recently finished revamping my homelab, and I’m very excited about it. For the past 6+ months my “homelab” consisted of an old laptop running Linux and a bunch of docker containers. This worked surprisingly well, but increasingly I found myself wanted to spin up test envrionments of multiple machines. That old laptop didn’t have the power to support those kinds of labs, and I didn’t have a good set of tooling for creating, configuring, and backing up these VM or container stacks.