Category Archives: Troubleshooting

Various problems solutions

VictoriaTraces: Recording Rules, Metrics, and Alerts from Trace Spans
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22 May 2026

VictoriaTraces – just like VictoriaLogs – supports Recording Rules (see VictoriaMetrics: Recording Rules for AWS Load Balancer logs) for traces, because traces are essentially the same logs, just structured differently. And since we have Recording Rules – we can build metrics out of logs for alerts and Grafana dashboards. Although this actually isn’t the best… Read More »

Arch Linux: a DNS Mystery – VPN, systemd-resolved, and Unbound
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21 May 2026

I’d been wrestling with the problem of accessing AWS EKS from the office for a long time – finally lost my patience and figured it out 🙂 Here’s the problem: there’s an AWS EKS cluster with both Public and Private endpoints for the API. Working from my office laptop, sometimes requests to it go through… Read More »

OpenTelemetry: OTel Collectors in Kubernetes and VictoriaMetrics Stack integration
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16 May 2026

Today let’s talk about how to run OpenTelemetry in Kubernetes and integrate it with the VictoriaMetrics stack – VictoriaMetrics for metrics, VictoriaLogs for logs, and VictoriaTraces for traces. Actually, this post wasn’t planned at all, and once a draft did appear – it was supposed to be the third in the series, but in the… Read More »

Arch Linux: WireGuard Peer for Connecting to MikroTik
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8 May 2026

In the post MikroTik: setting up WireGuard and connecting Linux peers I described how to set up MikroTik as a VPN Hub and connect a peer running on Debian Linux. Setup on Arch Linux is mostly the same as on Debian – but every time I end up digging through this blog and my other… Read More »

SSL/TLS: Self-signed Certificate Authority for NGINX on FreeBSD
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18 April 2026

I run a bunch of web services on my home NAS – Grafana, VictoriaMetrics, my own WordPress blog, and half a dozen other small things. The whole series of posts on FreeBSD and NAS starts here – FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – setting up ZFS mirror, there are 15 parts as of now. NGINX+PHP… Read More »

AWS: Basic Infrastructure Setup for WordPress
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15 March 2026

It’s time for a major server upgrade for RTFM, which I usually do by migrating to a new server – because I also do various other upgrades along the way, like upgrading the PHP version or even migrating to a different cloud. This time I’m planning to move from DigitalOcean, where RTFM has been hosted… Read More »

FreeBSD: Home NAS, Part 15: Automating Backups – scripts, rsync, rclone
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15 March 2026

This is essentially the last major task – setting up automated backup creation. In the post FreeBSD: Home NAS, Part 13: Planning Data Storage and Backups I described the general idea in more detail – what gets backed up, where, what gets stored and how – and today is the purely technical part about the actual… Read More »

MikroTik: WireGuard VPN Setup and Linux Peer Configuration
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14 March 2026

Another one of the many nice features of MikroTik – built-in WireGuard support (although even cheap TP-Link Archers have it). In my setup, the MikroTik RB4011 acts as a “VPN Hub” – all clients connect to it and are united into a single network, and the role of VPN is slightly exaggerated is genuinely important… Read More »

Raspberry Pi: first experience and installation of Raspberry Pi OS Lite
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13 March 2026

For those who don’t follow updates in the Telegram channel rtfmcoua or are visiting my blog for the first time, a reminder that for the last couple of months I’ve been building a “self-hosted home stack”, which already includes a couple of MikroTik devices and a ThinkCentre running FreeBSD. On the ThinkCentre / FreeBSD I… Read More »

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 10 – monitoring with VictoriaMetrics and Grafana
3.8 (6)

7 February 2026

Finally got around to monitoring. I was interested in running a standard stack with VictoriaMetrics + Grafana + Alertmanager not in the usual Kubernetes with a Helm chart, but simply on the host. However, the approach is the same as monitoring services in AWS/Kubernetes – on FreeBSD, we will have VictoriaMetrics for metrics, Grafana for… Read More »