Virtualization, IT Support, and... Home Labs? How Automox Techies Use Automox

Summary

In this episode, Landon Miles discusses how he uses virtualization and Automox in different scenarios. He first talks about using virtualization to experiment with the Automox platform in isolated environments. Then, Landon explains how he can use Automox on his family's devices to ensure they are up to date with the latest security patches. Finally, he shares how he can incorporate Automox into his home lab to automate patching and updates.

Episode Transcript

Landon Miles: Hello and welcome back to the Hands -on IT podcast. As always, I'm your host, Landon Miles. Now this podcast is a part of the Automox Autonomous IT podcast network, and you can look for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. So from the latest in vulnerabilities, cybersecurity, to everything IT, the Autonomous IT podcast network has something for you. So this month we've been discussing how Automox uses Automox.

Now, my use cases are a little bit different than most of our customers and most everyone else at Automox, but I think it's pretty interesting and we're going to discuss it today. So we have a great show lined up for you today and there's a lot of stuff to discuss.

All right. So when I started at Automox, I needed a way to play with the software at scale, but without messing up anyone else's workflow or their devices. So for me, the quickest way to learn something is to get in there, play with it, push some buttons and figure out how it works. So I turned to virtualization. Now for those unfamiliar with virtualization, virtualization is a technology that allows you to create simulated environments or virtual machines.

on a single physical hardware system. So this enables multiple operating systems and applications to run independently on the same hardware. So you can have a computer running 10 or so operating systems independently all at the same time. Now, by using virtualization, you can optimize resources, utilization, reduce costs, and increase flexibility and scalability. But in my case, leveraging virtualization meant that I could experiment with the Automox platform

isolated environments without impacting anyone else. So I really enjoy repurposing old hardware, but the same thing could be done in your cloud provider of choice, whether that's AWS, Azure, Linode, Digital Ocean, or the like. But the only purpose of these virtual machines was to run the Automox agent and create demos for, well, you, my dear listener, (and those are at discover.automox.com if you want to check those out.)

now like every scroungy IT professional, I asked our IT department for some used hardware, loaded up Proxmox, created a cluster and away we went. So Proxmox is a Debian Linux based operating system specifically designed for virtualization. It provides robust and flexible environments for managing virtual machines and containers very easily. has a web interface.

and it leverages the KVM hypervisor for full virtualization. So in the industry side of things, it allows you to efficiently scale and manage your resources. For me, it allowed me to turn a few computers into 70 and potentially more actually, but 70 is the sweet spot before my office gets too hot. So Proxmox, as we said, offers an easy to use web interface.

and it makes it straightforward to handle complex virtualization tasks, backups, live migrations, clustering. Again, I don't really need any of that. I just needed a bunch of virtual machines. And since they are doing nothing except being used in a demo environment, I didn't really feel good about paying a monthly cloud subscription for that. So now I have around 70 or so endpoints within the Automox console that I can play with, create workloads for, and help create demos

that addresses pain points of our customers or anyone else that's using the software. Now, the next area I use Automox is on my family's devices. Now, like most IT professionals that I know, I've been the go -to IT person for my family and friends for about as long as I can remember. Now, no matter how many times I tell them to update, most of the time helping them was babysitting operating system updates, waiting for them to download.

or updating their software. Now, as a disclaimer, I do get Automox for free since I'm an employee there, but this has been such a quality of life upgrade that I would 100 % pay for it. Now, with my family's devices all connected to Automox, I can easily make sure that they're up to date with the latest security patches. No more sending that, "you should probably update your computer" text that we kind of get scared about in IT because we're

much more up to date on vulnerabilities than the common person. But this is especially important for those family members who may not be as tech savvy or tend to neglect regular updates. It's an additional piece of mind for the kiddos' laptops, family laptops, parents, or anyone else that calls you regularly for IT support. Now, the third and final place that I use Automox is in my home lab. So I'm a nerd, not necessarily your comic book type of nerd, not

These can't coexist, but I'm a home server nerd. It started out as a project in COVID when we were kind of all stuck at home. And as those things typically go, it exploded from there. It's fun, useful, great way to fill up my time, solve problems. And a lot of times I don't have as much time as I'd like to manage the system, make sure it's all up to date. Everything is good. And instead of applying updates whenever I have time, I added

that server to Automox and away we went. So My home lab is pretty humble. It's just a used one liter PC that I I bought off eBay because someone thought it was broken. Now in the picture of the eBay listing, they had the monitor connected to the wrong output. This one liter PC had a graphics card and definitely wasn't plugged in correctly.

pro tips here. So I ordered it, got it working, and I run a handful of things on there that my family uses all the time. It's a media server, a file server, home automation hub, and I even have a recipe app that my wife really likes. Shout out to Mealie, if you're looking for that. But automating, patching, and configuration and updates leaves a lot more time for the fun stuff, a lot more peace of mind if I'm away or if somethings

gone awry that needs to be updated, there's a vulnerability out there. It's just added a lot of peace of mind. Now, if you ever decide to start into the home server hobby, you will quickly find people that have way cooler home labs than you do. So naturally, this transitions perfectly into our guest this week, Anthony Maxwell.

Landon Miles: All right, hello Anthony and welcome to the Hands-On IT podcast.

Anthony Maxwell: Hey, awesome. Thanks for having me.

Landon Miles: Yeah! Can you give us a quick introduction of who you are a bit about your background, your role at Automox and kind of how you ended up in software engineering, I guess.

Anthony Maxwell: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So Anthony Maxwell, software engineer here at Automox.

Interestingly enough, my background is more in the IT Ops space. So I've got a background in... once upon a time, I did a lot of systems and network architecture. Spent a brief time doing some stuff like, you know, implemented cybersecurity programs, you know, things of that nature, technology strategies, stuff like that. So ultimately, though, you know, I kind of fell out of love with the space. You know, I did it and loved it. I loved what I was doing for a very long time. Just got to a point, though, where the charm wasn't in it for me anymore.

Landon Miles: Yeah, for sure.

Anthony Maxwell: You know, I'd kind of been writing software as a hobby for geez, nearly, I guess, just about 20 years now. Yeah. So coming out of that, I was like, you know, this feels like a this feels like a natural evolution. You know, it's always been something I've loved doing. Let's take let's take a shot at that.

Landon Miles: Ah- nice.

nice. Well, very cool. So one of the reasons that I asked you to come on, I told you this, we've been talking about virtualization and, and home labs a little bit in the podcast. And so with home labs, there's always someone that has a cooler homelab than you. And you're the person with the coolest homelab that I know of. So I thought I thought I'd have you on. But yeah, you want to give us a quick little introduction about your homelab, the server infrastructure that you maintain personally.

Anthony Maxwell: Sure.

Ha ha ha.

Yeah, sure. So I'll try to keep it brief because it's a hefty stack. So yeah, so I've got a 4U Dell R720XD server that's got a PERC H730P RAID controller in it. So the kind

Landon Miles: Hahaha

Anthony Maxwell: It's got two 32 core Xeons, 256 gigs of RAM, 10gb networking card. That's a four port 10 gig card in there running Proxmox virtual environment right now.

So that's like the server side of things. In terms of the storage in that box though, actually it's all flash storage running on that physical RAID controller. I've got like, there's two onboard SD cards that run in RAID 1. Those host the Proxmox operating system. And then I've got on that physical PERC 730P controller, I've got...

a RAID 10 array of all flash storage and that's where you know VMs live and all that stuff and then aside from that I've got just a little Synology DS920 plus NAS just kind of used for cold storage backup storage stuff like that and then I'm actually using an fs.com switch which I guarantee nobody's ever heard of but it was a was a 10 gig capable

Landon Miles: Ha ha.

Anthony Maxwell: 10 gig capable switch with redundant power supplies that I got for like 300 bucks and that kind of blew me away. So that's kind of the high level of the stack I got going

Landon Miles: Yeah, that's awesome. That's a pretty solid deal. but yeah. then, yeah. So can you share some of like the favorite projects you've deployed in your homelab?

Anthony Maxwell: Yeah, it was great deal.

favorite projects. You know, it's interesting. Man, favorite projects. You know what? I think... this is a tough one. saw the easiest one I could think of off the top is I did deploy Vaultwarden on there, which, you know, for anybody out there that's unfamiliar, Vaultwarden is a, it's a Rust implementation of Bitwarden. So super small memory footprint, super lightweight, super quick and responsive.

I deployed that on my stack that was a blast.

Honestly, think my favorite project I rolled out on there though was within the Proxmox virtual environment, I stood up three VMs that I allocated the host resources to like 33, 33, 33, sliced it three ways and allocated it to each of the three VMs. And then on each of the three VMs, I installed Docker, put them in Docker swarm mode, and then used GlusterFS to do clustered storage between the three nodes that replicates with like a raft consensus algorithm.

You get real-time storage synchronization between your three VMs there. And I ran that in a Docker swarm with Traefik, which Traefik is awesome in and of itself. It's a reverse proxy solution that has support for Docker labels. So I can spin up containers and slap a label on it that says...

Landon Miles: Yeah.

Anthony Maxwell: expect it at this hostname and it automatically generates an SSL cert through Let's Encrypt for that hostname, takes the port from the label, routes Traefik across the Docker swarm overlay routing mesh to hit the container across an encrypted virtual network.

Landon Miles: Nice. Yeah, so one of my favorite things about my homelab is that it's just a place to be able to mess around. so, yeah, it's kind of the, like, this is, I've been doing this at work. I want to try it this way, or like, what happens if I push this button? And it's a way that you can kind of do that, learn and figure out what happens if you push the buttons with no consequences. So.

Anthony Maxwell: Sure.

Landon Miles: But so with that, there anything that you've kind of learned within your homelab that you've gotten to use kind of within either of your jobs, whether it was in kind of the IT infrastructure side of things or software engineering?

Anthony Maxwell: So, interestingly enough, I think the biggest thing that I've used a ton is I hosted my own self-hosted GitHub Actions runners on that Proxmox virtual environment.

And I use that as a guinea pig area for all kinds of stuff that I didn't even know it at the time that I would ever need it within the scope of what I'm doing today at Automox. But I was doing all kinds of work and exploiting the heck out of how I could use GitHub Actions with those self-hosted runners for all kinds of tasks ranging from continuous delivery to various CI testing in an environment that replicated where I wanted these things to run in. And lo and behold, I would then later become involved in an internal project

at Automox to migrate everything to GitHub Actions. Here we are. Value came back around.

Landon Miles: Nice. Very cool. It sure does. Sure does. At least that's what I try to try to sell it to my family on. This is important. Yeah. Well, let's see. then, so I guess since this is Automox, do you use Automox in your homelab or kind of, yeah, I think you've mentioned before that you used Automox. You were a customer of Automox before you joined Automox. So if you want to kind of view that, you give us a little bit of insight on that and how you used.

Anthony Maxwell: Yeah

I was.

Landon Miles: or still use Automox within your server environments and your home

Anthony Maxwell: Yeah, sure. So yeah, before I came to Automox, I was an independent IT consultant, again, mainly doing things like technology strategy, cybersecurity programming, things of that nature. So in that role, I had basically all kinds of paperwork agreements I would establish between myself and my clients in terms of my own cybersecurity policy, for example.

there were a number of agreements that were typically involved in order to interact with and contract with these customers. And I used Automox to automate policy compliance for that stuff across the board. So basically everything that I defined that I was doing in my written cybersecurity policies,

A lot of my yeah, a lot of my cybersecurity policy stuff adhered to a lot of CIS benchmarking criteria. So that was I basically automated all of that through Automox Worklets. Yeah, and then patching, of course. Absolutely.

Landon Miles: Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, that's important. Yeah, and then so I always like to ask this question when I'm talking to people about their home labs is, does your family know that they're using your homelab?

Anthony Maxwell: Do they know that they're using it? Yes. Do they know to the extent that they're using it? I guarantee you, Definitely not.

Landon Miles: Nice, nice. Yeah. And from the home assistant automations and everything else, it's try to try to keep that, yeah, keep the family approval factor up and that's, it's always the trick. So it's okay. That's light turned on when I walked in here. It's like, yeah, it sure did.

Anthony Maxwell: That's it. That's it.

-huh. Notice how you got no ads when you're out there browsing around on your cell phone?

Landon Miles: Yeah. That's the, why can't I click on this ad that gets me to sometimes, but you know, it's like there was an ad. yeah. Yeah. But it's like, maybe you shouldn't be clicking on that ad and that doesn't ever get me into a good spot either, but yeah. So can you provide some advice for any of our listeners that may be interested in getting started in maybe having a homelab or, started with an IT or software engineering too?

Anthony Maxwell: Yeah, I bumped into that one a couple times. Yeah.

Yeah, right. Right.

Sure, yeah. yeah, I mean, in terms of getting started with the homelab, mean, honestly, I would say first order of business, you can't go wrong with Proxmox. It's a super lightweight virtualization stack. You know, it'll run on a toaster.

And then on top of that, I would just say, just always keep your ear to the ground for people that are getting rid of old technology. If it's a desktop, a micro PC, a laptop, just always be on the lookout because again, in a HomeLab scenario, you can string together five laptops you got from a couple friends you knew that they were throwing out and turn it into a virtual server stack that runs 40, 50 VMs without a problem. So that's definitely a good two places to start.

Landon Miles: sure. Yeah, think my first homelab was a broken laptop. The screen had cracked on it and the hinge had broken. And so just took the screen off and had it sitting there. And that was my first homelab. had that for a couple years and it worked great. then I, it's one of those hobbies that you just kind of keep going with and it explodes a little bit sometimes too. But yeah, it's a good one. So

Anthony Maxwell: huh. huh. Yeah. Luckily when I went out and purchased my whole stack at the time it was a business expense. So I was like, you know what, let's go with the all flash storage.

Landon Miles: Hey, that's the dream. That's the dream. Yeah. Nice. Nice. So then what, what, what do you like to virtualize? What are your kind of virtualization systems of choice within Proxmox? Are you just running it in containers? Are you running virtualized environments or kind of what, what are you doing within, within

Anthony Maxwell: Yeah, everything's always I containerize everything for sure. I tried playing around with LXC for a bit there, which is like the, you know, the Linux open Docker container alternative. It's neat. It's fast. You know, it skips the the layer of virtualization I was injecting with running everything as a VM within Proxmox itself. So, you know, it super lightweight and fast. It's pretty nifty, you know, Proxmox builds in support for LXD container support right out of the box.

Landon Miles: or no.

Anthony Maxwell: It was quick and everything. But I just from a security standpoint, I didn't like the idea of all these containers because I've got a knack of just pulling down, testing and playing with stuff. You know, so I didn't like the idea of all these containers basically sharing a kernel with my my host OS right with Proxmox. So was like, I don't like this. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I containerize everything.

Landon Miles: We'll make another little virtual machine that sandboxed. yeah. Nice.

cool, very cool. What's your distro of choice then? Are you a Debian guy since you like Proxmox? What's your distro of choice?

Anthony Maxwell: You know, it's funny is I am a Windows native. I've been a Windows native my whole life. Now that's not to say I don't, you know, I don't know my way around Linux. You know, all my servers are. I am a Debian guy. Debian is my default distro of choice. Yeah, entry point was Ubuntu and I was like, you know what? There's just all this extra garbage packed in here. Went upstream to Debian.

Landon Miles: Good

Anthony Maxwell: And that's just kind of all I've run ever since. I played around briefly with Alma, Rocky, RHEL, Cloud Linux, Amazon Linux, and a few others. you know, I just like the Debian ecosystem.

Landon Miles: I do too. That's what I ended up with is, is Debian and after a similar trajectory after Ubuntu and partially is because 99 % of the commands are the same. I didn't have to learn anything new. It's like, yeah. And I tried several others. It's like, you know, I remember that. Yeah. It's like, I'll say what you will about apt, but I remember the, I remember the apt -get command and that's a muscle memory almost now. So.

Anthony Maxwell: Yep. Yep.

Yeah, exactly, right?

Landon Miles: But, well cool. Well, is there any, are there any resources that you use, podcasts or subreddits or communities that you use for your homelab or kind of keeping your ear to the ground with the new technologies that are coming

Anthony Maxwell: You know, I am an avid podcast listener and I'm always reading about, you know, new and emerging technologies, new innovations with existing technologies, things of that nature. I'm always, I've always got my ear to the ground for stuff like that. And, you know, I've just, I've never really found a news outlet or a community source that I really felt like gave me a consistently good experience or an experience that was in line with what I wanted out of it. Right.

Really, my discovery of technology and home labbing and stuff like that is really kind of my process for that's really been heading out to GitHub, just searching for topics, keywords, things I want to do or solve in my homelab, find solutions out there, sort by stars and just kind of go from there, right? Evaluate repositories, see what these guys are offering. If I like it enough, give it a quick code review. If the code looks clean, give it a shot in my homelab see how it plays, stuff like that. But yeah, news outlets and stuff.

Reddit route. Comments or something else, man. just...

Landon Miles: Yeah, you know, it's a, there's a lot of noise you have to sift through on that.

Anthony Maxwell: Yes. Yeah, that's exactly that's a way to put it. That's what I ran into is just a lot of noise.

Landon Miles: Yeah. It's like, I just want to solve this one problem. Yeah. Well, I don't need people telling me that it's actually not a problem. Yeah. And then, as far as podcasts or anything, do you listen to any kind of IT related podcasts or self hosted related podcasts? You can say my podcast. That's fine too. kidding. Yeah.

Anthony Maxwell: Yep. Yep.

IT or self-hosted? No. Besides yours. So like IT homelab related podcast? No, not anymore. I do listen to a good bit of software engineering podcasts

Landon Miles: Yeah. Very cool. And then I'll ask the last question we got is what are some trends or innovations that you saw? like, Hey, I'm, really want to try this out in my homelab. you mentioned GitHub Actions earlier, but some software it's like, this is an interesting piece of software that's coming out. This is a new piece of technology. I want to try this out here. And maybe you use it somewhere later down the line or, kind of

What are some innovations that you've kind of latched onto first in your home

Anthony Maxwell: Interesting question. Okay. let's see here. So the first one that immediately comes to mind is

Well, mean, HashiCorp Vault, right? That was one that many years ago, right? It's like, I caught wind of it for use. I needed a vaulting solution with a problem I had to solve at the time. And HashiCorp Vault looked very intriguing to me. I took that and deployed that. That went to the homelab first. And I like vetted that whole process out through homelab before I used it in production. That was a great example. GitHub Actions, as you mentioned. Man, I'm trying to think of it. There's

Landon Miles: Yeah. What's the file manager? We were talking the other day and you said that you moved on from Nextcloud.

Anthony Maxwell: FileRun. FileRun. Yeah, that's a really interesting file storage solution too. So for any of those that are not familiar out there, it's like basically a self-hosted, like OneDrive, Google Drive type thing. Offers identical functionality, does all that stuff. At the low price of 99 bucks is a one-time purchase. And it's incredible.

a thousand times more lightweight and fast than Google Drive and all those other competitors. And even the self-hosted solutions like Nextcloud, it's way faster.

Landon Miles: Yeah. So now does it use the Nextcloud client to transfer data? that if you, okay, nice.

Anthony Maxwell: Yes, yep, I did set it up like that. But I think it also supports, I mean it supports like standard like web dev. I think it does SMB. I know it does NFS. There's a handful of other protocols it supports too, but yeah, I did use it with the Nextcloud client.

Landon Miles: Very cool. And then how much raw storage do you have in your house so

Anthony Maxwell: Raw storage. So in my house, I have, I think, 20 terabytes. Yeah. How much is under my control? Yeah, yeah. across, yeah, across the on-prem HQ here and a couple cloud footprints I've got. I think it's somewhere around 60 terabytes right now.

Landon Miles: Or, yeah, all right. Then how much is under your control then, I guess?

impressive. That's a lot more than I have, think, I'm rocking like maybe one terabyte or so and looking to be more like you every day, Anthony. Yeah, for sure.

Anthony Maxwell: That's a lot of storage. Yeah.

Hey, you know, there's there's media hosting and stuff like that, right? 4K and 8K files are huge.

Landon Miles: They are. They sure are all those Blu-ray backups at least. Well, good. Well, yeah. Well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It was great talking to you. And is there anywhere you want to send the people?

Anthony Maxwell: That's it. That's it. Back up. See ya.

Yeah, it's great being on here. Thanks for asking

geez, mean, aside from the obvious, right? Check out Automox. That's it, man. That's it. You know, we just we just hit some major milestones with some new additions to third party software. Worklets, as you know, are growing out the wazoo. A lot of cool new features are coming out that I can't talk about right now, but a lot of really, really cool stuff is coming on the immediate horizon. So, yeah, excellent time to to be an Automox customer and even better time to get into the Automox ecosystem.

Landon Miles: Yeah, hey, perfect. That's what we wanted you to say.

Awesome, well, automox.com for you then. All right, well, thanks so much, Anthony, and we'll talk to you soon.

Anthony Maxwell: That's it, man. That's where to go. That's it.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Landon. Have a good one.

Landon Miles: You too.

So that's all we have for today. If you have a HomeLab, Home Server, or a fun project you've been working on, we'd love to hear about it in the Automox Community. But until next time, find something to tinker with, a bunch of buttons to push, maybe even something to take apart and figure out how it works. Thank you, and we'll see you next time.