Back to my old tricks and it feels amazing. There’ve been a good few times throughout the gap years where I’ve thought “You know, I’d really like to deploy this software but I don’t have infrastructure anymore.” I missed being able to just login to my virtualization server, run virt-install, and have a server ready to go. And what I’m doing now is much the same - except for some new tricks I’ve picked up in the intervening years.

Instead of just running virt-install, now I generate a new MAC address for the VM, provision that in pfSense’s DHCP server, and instantiate the VM with the right bridge interface and the generated MAC.

And instead of installing from some random mirror, I have a copy of CentOS 10-Stream’s BaseOS and AppStream repositories, alongside a kickstart file.

Now I can paste the command, walk off and make some coffee, and come back to a VM that knows its IP and hostname ready to go. Things were never this smooth for me before.

Future plans, when I rehabilitate the hardware, are to experiment with Pacemaker and Corosync to see if I can’t build a HA cluster out of my three Precision 3420 workstations.