Jourdan Lambert

Every PR that touches Ansible playbooks should pass ansible-lint and ansible-playbook --check. GitHub Actions runs them automatically - no “I’ll lint before merge” discipline required.

API keys, backup passwords, Proxmox tokens. You need them in Ansible. You don’t want them in plaintext in Git. Ansible Vault encrypts files so you can commit them safely.

“When the network dies at 2am, you learn to love ethtool. And kernel pinning. And backups.” - Homelab incident retrospective “Game over, man! Game over!” - Aliens. When the NIC goes dark mid-backup, it feels that way. But there’s a fix. Proxmox hosts with Intel I217/I219 NICs (e1000e driver) can lose network connectivity under load. Backups freeze. VMs go dark. Unplugging and replugging the cable sometimes brings it back. This is a kernel regression - not your hardware.

The automated Proxmox install gets you a configured host from a USB stick. But what happens in month two? Package updates, SSH hardening drift, backup schedule changes. Manual changes on a single host become tribal knowledge. Add a second node and you’re copy-pasting configs. Ansible picks up where first-boot leaves off. “The spice must flow.” - Dune. So must your config. Automate it.

Scheduled Ansible runs fail silently. A host is unreachable, a variable is wrong, or SSH keys expired. You find out when the host drifts. Uptime Kuma’s push monitor fixes that.

Ansible works when you run it. Ad-hoc runs drift. Schedule the patch playbook weekly and forget about it.

I found my Gmail password in Git. In a public repo. Three months after I pushed it.

Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) running on your Synology NAS. Automated VM and container backups with deduplication, compression, and incremental snapshots. Disaster recovery for your homelab in one script.

Talos Linux Kubernetes cluster on Proxmox VE via Terraform. Image factory, VM provisioning, bootstrap, credentials - one terraform apply.

Migrating a Helm-based media stack from imperative scripts to Flux GitOps. Same charts, same values, automated delivery.