Using USB Gadget Mode on Raspberry Pi Zero for SSH/RDP Access on Windows 11

The Raspberry Pi Zero is a versatile device that can be configured to act as a USB Ethernet gadget, allowing you to connect to it via SSH or RDP over a single USB cable. This is especially useful when you want a direct network connection without additional hardware. In this article, we will guide you through setting up the Pi Zero in USB gadget mode and installing the necessary Windows 11 drivers for seamless connectivity.

On my home server, I was slowly getting annoyed that I didn’t really have an idea of what was happening in the syslog, and when an application, for example, throws an Out of memory error, I simply don’t know about it. That’s why I decided to send syslog to Promtail, which pushes it to Loki (Grafana) and processes it.

Today I discovered that a container in my home Kubernetes crashed, which is responsible for downloading the price of the SP500 ETF fund, which is then taken by Prometheus and passed to my Grafana.

If you work with Docker, you’ve surely noticed recently that DockerHub requires authentication when you download a bit more from it. In this article, I’ve decided to describe how to handle this in connection with MicroK8s.

The first thing we need to modify is the file /var/snap/microk8s/current/args/certs.d/docker.io/hosts.toml. If any subdirectory or file doesn’t exist, create it. The file should look like this:

server = "https://docker.io"

[host."https://registry-1.docker.io"]
  capabilities = ["pull", "resolve"]
  [host."https://registry-1.docker.io".auth]
    username = "YOUR_DOCKERHUB_USERNAME"
    identitytoken = "dckr_pat_TOKEN"

You need to generate a token on the DockerHub website. You can do this by clicking on Account -> Personal Access Tokens

So today I was working on my home server, and I accidentally discovered from monitoring that some services weren’t running. Since my home Kubernetes server is more for playing around, but also hosts some public things, I get messages from Nagios once every 24 hours, so it doesn’t disturb me too much, but at the same time makes me aware of the need to address issues.

It’s true that I run my own server with Kubernetes at home, but what does it actually look like, and what do I test on it? At the beginning, I built an “enterprise” solution that is on the level of large corporations, at least on the surface - I have my own repository for OCI images, my own pipelines in GitHub for creating OCI images, and even my own installation of ArgoCD.

If you ever want to connect to a virtual machine in Azure from a corporate network and you don’t have a dedicated line or dedicated IP, you’ll likely run into issues. You’ll be behind a corporate proxy and won’t be able to get out easily, nor can you expect anyone to allow you access to all SSH or RDP ports on the external network.

Recently, I’ve been dealing with an interesting problem. I have a large number of websites that I want to randomly visit a few of each day. It’s not an unsolvable problem - I copied the sites into Google Sheets and used ChatGPT to write a script that randomly selects ten sites and opens them in a new window.