Category Archives: Lab Infrastructure

Migrating Salt Minions to a New Master

Posted on September 24, 2026 by brian.wuchner

This is a follow-up to a previous post, where I stood up a new single-node VMware Salt deployment to replace my old Aria Automation Config setup. This post covers the actual cutover: moving every existing minion in the homelab from … Continue reading →

Posted in Lab Infrastructure, Scripting | Leave a comment

Replacing Aria Automation Config with VMware Salt (Single-Node) in My Homelab

Posted on September 24, 2026 by brian.wuchner

A couple of years ago I ran SaltStack Config (later rebranded Aria Automation Config) in my homelab for automated Linux patching. For various reasons, I stopped maintaining it and reverted to rather infrequent, manual patching. Recently I decided it was … Continue reading →

Posted in Lab Infrastructure, Virtualization | 1 Comment

Building a Rocky Linux 9.8 Template VM by Hand

Posted on September 22, 2026 by brian.wuchner

Most of my lab runs on Ubuntu VMs built and updated through Packer, but a recent project called for a Rocky Linux template. Since this isn’t something I expect to repeat often, I didn’t want to invest time building out … Continue reading →

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Troubleshooting a “Dead Timeout” NVMe Device on ESX

Posted on August 13, 2026 by brian.wuchner

I’ve been spending some time working with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 in my lab environment. The lab consists of several nested ESXi hosts that use NFS storage provided by a virtual machine. The VM providing the NFS storage, in … Continue reading →

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Troubleshooting Aria Automation Orchestrator Deployment

Posted on June 17, 2026 by brian.wuchner

While deploying VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator 8.18.1 in standalone mode through Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager (LCM), I encountered the following error during configuration: The deployment completed successfully, I was able to login to Orchestrator and it looked healthy, but the … Continue reading →

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