I use CheckMK extensively at work, and I also run a small home lab with a few regular desktop Windows hosts. Many years ago, I set up a CheckMK HWiNFO64 plugin to monitor the hardware sensors on those hosts, and this was fine, until the CheckMK v2 agent-based API came along. The old plugin was written for the legacy CheckMK agent, and it was time to rewrite and improve it.

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.