Tag: Debian

Migrate Zabbix/Grafana to new server

I’m in the process of migrating hypervisors and the time has come to move my Zabbix instance that monitors my network, and Grafana that I use for dashboard displays.

Instead of a backup and restore of the VM, it seems the right time to migrate Zabbix and Grafana from an aging RHEL 8 instance to a new VM running a fresh copy of Debian 13. At the same time upgrading the applications to their latest versions…

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Asus X205TA – Lengthen Laptop Life with Linux

It’s strange to think that I’ve had this laptop around for nearly 10 years. Putting those years in context of my technical knowledge, it seems a lifetime ago.

I owe a lot to this little, £130, underpowered (even at the time) machine. Sat in my car refining and sending off my CV for numerous jobs whilst waiting for my hateful call centre job to begin helped me break into a technical role.

The end of Windows 10 support in October 2025 could be considered a full stop on this laptop’s usefulness, however Windows claimed this as a victim long ago. The 32GB eMMC storage was entirely consumed by just the operating system and its pending updates, which relegated this system to version 18.09.

One point of the X205TA that really impressed was the battery life, with an OS estimated 10 hours at full charge it was something 2016 me had never seen before.

The thought occurred that I’d like a lounge terminal, something with a proper keyboard and screen that I could use to SSH into other machines, with a web browser for reference.

Could I breathe new life into the X205TA with the introduction of a Linux Desktop?

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Debian 12: KVM Guest using Bridged Network

I’ve been playing with KVM on Debian 12 as a candidate for moving away from VMware as a hypervisor on my home server. I’ve been testing by using Debian 12 as VM in ESXI set with hardware CPU/MMU enabled, and virtualisaion passthrough enabled.

I’d like the KVM guests to access the network in bridge mode of the host for direct access to the network. However I faced the following issue:

  • KVM host can ping gateway and internet.
  • KVM host can ping the guest.
  • Guest can ping the host.
  • Guest cannot ping gateway or anything outside of the host.
  • Guest is showing in router ARP table, with its IP address and own MAC

This one got me for more time than I wish to admit, and seems to have caught others out along the way, this is how I finally solved it…

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