Redfish – apt-upgrade.me – Homelab, Linux & DevSecOps

The iLO Knows the Temperature, But Not Yesterday’s: Building a Heat History for My Homelab Rack

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:15:38 +0200

It started with a simple question on a lazy afternoon: how warm are my three servers, actually? The iLO answered instantly: intake air 22 to 25 °C, fans idling at 6 %, everything green. Great. Then the follow-up question: and during the heat wave in July? Silence. The iLO 5 shows temperatures and fans live only. No history, no graph, no “last Tuesday”. So I built one, and it’s on GitHub: aptupgrademe/ilo-thermal.

My Own Little Certificate Authority: AD CS, Auto-Enrollment and Goodbye to “Your Connection Is Not Private”

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:05:28 +0200

My homelab has three domain controllers, two clients, three iLO management boards and, until last week, exactly zero certificates anyone had a reason to trust. Every RDP session started with a warning, every iLO greeted me with “Your connection is not private” (issuer: Default Issuer (Do not trust), which is at least honest), and the domain controllers didn’t speak LDAPS at all.

I don’t run many internal web services, so for a while I assumed a private PKI was a solution looking for a problem. Wrong. A Windows domain has plenty of places where certificates quietly make things better. The trick is to let Active Directory hand them out on its own, so that I never have to think about renewing them again.

Day Two Operations: Hardening Three Windows Domain Controllers (and Finding a Clock That Answered to Nobody)

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:57:03 +0200

In the last post three HP boxes became a Windows Server 2025 domain: AD, DNS, DHCP failover, Group Policy, BitLocker, Storage Spaces. That was day one: everything installed, everything green, everything “works”.

This post is about day two, the part where you stop admiring the green checkmarks and start asking uncomfortable questions. What time is it, according to whom? Which services are running that nobody asked for? What happens if a server simply doesn’t boot tomorrow? Spoiler: one of those questions had a very funny answer.