Well, a lot of time has passed since the last post. Whoops, I’m making a habit of that. The past year or two has been very full, and one thing I have been occupying my time with is astrophotography.

In the past year or so, I’ve been getting into macro photography, posting my best to Flickr. I’ve tried out a few different kit configurations, diffusers and flashes, but following is a description of what I’m currently using most.

I do some bird photography, using a Sigma 150-600C Contemporary lens with my Canon R7. There’s a few issues with the Sigma and the R7 - focus pulses in and out, however it can be dealt with by some adjustments. It’s not perfect, but it does perform much better.

If you happen to be using a Protectli VP2420, equipped with a Celeron J6412 CPU, and you’re having random KVM virtual machine crashes when running Proxmox, notably with crashes that produce an ‘internal-error’ message in Proxmox, have I got the post for you!

Sometimes with virtual machines, it’s necessary to have a watchdog timer that monitors the VM and automatically restarts it in the case of any serious problems such as hangs. I have that need, and need such a configuration for both KVM and for Proxmox guests. Fortunately this is easy to set up.

Leaning on vmWare PowerCLI for much of my day-to-day system administration needs, I also have need for running PowerCLI scripts regularly. There are many ways to do this, but since I have an OpenShift cluster available, why not run those scripts in containers so you can simply set up a cronjob manifest to run them?