Panic! At The Terminal

Welcome to Panic! At The Terminal #

This blog is a curated collection of Linux commands, system administration tutorials, and DevOps guides that I’ve accumulated over a few years of working in IT.

My Background #

My journey into Linux started during university when I realized I was headed toward a career in system administration. After graduation, I landed my first job managing around 20-30 Linux servers at a small company, where I got to completely overhaul their Linux infrastructure management approach (which I mostly did during my spare time when I wasn’t putting out active “fires”).

During that role, I introduced several key technologies that transformed how we managed our environment:

  • AWX for automated updates and configuration management
  • Nagios Core for comprehensive monitoring (everything from Windows/Linux servers to Xeroxes and smart locks)
  • Centralized log management for better troubleshooting and compliance
  • FreeIPA for centralized authentication

Later, I moved to a much larger environment managing several thousand Linux servers, where I handled provisioning, incident response, and continued working with Ansible. Eventually, I transitioned into a DevOps Engineer role where I focus heavily on PowerShell development for internal tooling.

While I write a lot of PowerShell at work, my homelab remains a Linux playground where I experiment with the technologies you’ll read about here. Maybe someday I’ll share some of those PowerShell eureka moments too!

Posts #

Check the sidebar on the left for all of my posts.

My Homelab Setup #

I run a RHEL9 homelab on bare metal RHEL9 with libvirt on an Intel NUC NUC11TNHi7. Here’s what I’m running:

Infrastructure #

The setup hosts a dozen virtual RHEL9 machines:

  • Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP): Provisions and configures all VMs, handles automatic updates, backups, and configuration management
  • Two Red Hat IdM servers (IPA): Centralized authentication in HA configuration
  • Two BIND9 servers: Internal DNS resolution with redundancy
  • GitLab: Self-hosted Git repository and CI/CD platform
  • GitLab Runner: Executes CI pipelines for my GitLab instance

Services & Applications #

  • LibreNMS: Network and server monitoring
  • Nginx Proxy Manager: Reverse proxy with TLS termination for internet-exposed services
  • Bitwarden: Self-hosted password manager
  • Hugo: Powers this blog (the theme is called Book)
  • Google Home Automation Assistant: Smart home integration
  • Healthchecks.io: Monitors scheduled jobs and automation tasks

About #

These guides used to be just raw commands in my OneNote, so I decided to put them into a blog format so other people can read them as well.

Contact #

Got feedback or questions about any of the guides? Feel free to reach out: antti@nousiainen.xyz

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