Eric Li DevOps & Network Architecture

A Sandbox VM, a Phone That Won't Sync and Garage Prep

Homelab · 2026-10-09 · Friday · 9:51 PM · 3 min read · Eric Li

A quieter day. I worked from about 00:06 to 01:16, and again from 19:16 to 21:51.

A sandbox VM on pve02

After midnight I built a general-purpose Ubuntu 24.04 VM on pve02. The lab convention is that the last octet of the IP matches the VM ID minus 100, so VM 139 gets x.x.0.39. Before using it I checked that the ID and address were free. The UniFi client search doesn't match partial IPs, so a search for the neighbouring range came back empty even though several addresses there are live. I tested the lookup against a known-live address before I trusted "free".

I downloaded the cloud image, checked its SHA256 and built the VM on local-zfs with a static address, guest tools and no HA. I put my lab keys on it and left out the shared pve01 key on purpose, since that one is already on my list to untangle. It starts at 2 vCPUs, which I later raised to 4. It goes into the nightly vzdump job like every other guest, and I added an ssh sandy shortcut on the workstation VM.

Writing the runsheet turned up some wrong rows in the index. The stopped backup server VM is on pve02, not pve04 as three places said. The pve02 row claimed it ran two guests that actually live on pve01 and pve03. I fixed those. The pve01 and pve03 rows are stale too, and I left them.

Later I installed Samba and shared the VM's home folder so I could map it as a drive on my PC. Setting the share password failed from my PC, because the VM only trusts the workstation VM's keys. I'll either hop through the workstation VM or add my PC's key.

A mailbox that won't sync

In the evening I looked at why one of the hotel's mailboxes doesn't arrive on a phone. It was desk work and a few questions. The mail is hosted in Microsoft's cloud, and the address exists. I confirmed that with a lookup, after first proving it could return "not found" for a made-up address. On the phone it's the stock Mail app with an Exchange account, "Use SSL" on and no sync limit. That "Use SSL" toggle suggests the account was added through Configure Manually, a password-only Exchange login that Microsoft no longer allows. I'd delete the account and re-add it with the Microsoft sign-in option. If it turns out to be a shared mailbox, it may need adding differently. I haven't confirmed the cause, and I didn't send a test email.

Prep for a garage and camera job

I'm going to a house to fit a WiFi garage door controller, and two solar security cameras have dropped off their base station. The house has a three-node mesh router. I read up on each piece.

The account situation changed twice. First I thought the homeowner had forgotten the camera account and everything needed a reset. At 21:51 it turned out the base station is already on an account, so I'll leave it alone and add the two cameras to that account.

Still open