A panoramic vista somewhere in central Alberta

The LLM Server

I’ll admit I am somewhat late to the party. While the mainstream LLM offerings have been useful since they emerged, in recent months their utility has become integral to day to day life, and setting up a proper agentic tooling workflow seems a core requirement to doing hands on technical work efficiently. But I do hate those monthly plans. It was comments made by Linus Torvalds that first got me truly interested in the underlying technology. ...

Sean HignettSean Hignett  · August 21, 2026
Heading into the canyon

Go Hugo

Shut out of Ghost because it couldn’t send email to 2P verify me? I don’t recall configuring email, but if I did… I now feel ashamed. What a pile of @#$#@! Their docs suggested I should sign up with one of several mail providers to handle my outgoing email for a reasonable fee. I thought… Why did I ever run Ghost? If they are trying to sell something I don’t think it is FOSS in the original sense. SnakeOil-OSS would be more apt. ...

Sean HignettSean Hignett  · August 20, 2026
Railway tracks leading off into the horizon somewhere in central Alberta

Kubernetes in a State of Flux

Cluster Builder was recently updated to support Flux CD GitOps, which drives the Kubernetes configuration serving this site. Cluster Builder tooling is used to deploy a base Kubernetes 1.33 cluster using KubeAdm to a cluster of KVM VMs running on Proxmox VE. Included are the foundational Canal CNI, the Flux Operator and a Sealed Secrets deployment based on an external key pair. Using the external, pre-created key pair for encrypting Sealed Secrets ensures that the same GitOps repo can support multiple clusters, and that the clusters themselves can be deployed and re-deployed as required. ...

Sean HignettSean Hignett  · September 25, 2025
A panoramic vista somewhere in central Alberta

The Homelab Gets an Upgrade

After nearly 10 years the Intel Core i7-7700s have been retired. Replaced with a single UM790 Ryzen 9 7940HS. Added 96GB of DDR5 SODIMM and 1.5 TB of NVMe storage. The unit runs off a tiny Cyber Power ST425VA UPS, with network supplied by a TP-Link Wifi Ethernet Bridge (RE315) connecting to the Starlink Wifi Network. I did all this when DDR5 RAM could still be purchased. Setup was without issue. The units claim max 64GB RAM, but forums revealed they would take the new 128GB SODIMMs, and my 96GB was recognized OOTB. ...

Sean HignettSean Hignett  · July 1, 2025
A panoramic vista somewhere in central Alberta

Rural Homelab Up and Running

The Outpost is live! See the about page for details.

Sean HignettSean Hignett  · June 30, 2025