Category: Linux

From ClickOps to DevOps, building secure Windows images with Packer on Proxmox

December 19, 2025 / Michael Waterman / 2 Comments

Update 26-12-2025: Uploaded new and improved PowerShell scripts to GitHub. Added Windows 11, Ubuntu Server & Ubuntu Desktop to the repository.

In June 2023, I wrote a blog about the principle of clean source. At its core, clean source is about knowing exactly what you are using as the foundation of your installations, and automating that process so the outcome is predictable and repeatable.

Back then, I relied on what we now have to call legacy tooling. While that approach still works, it was already showing its age. Tools like MDT have been deprecated for quite some time, and although community efforts try to keep them alive, it’s clear that this path is slowly coming to an end.

That realization pushed me to take a step back and ask a simple question: why not approach this from a DevOps mindset instead? As it turns out, that opened the door to some pretty cool possibilities.

Fixing Packer + Proxmox template build failures: “can’t lock file … got timeout”

November 29, 2025 / Michael Waterman / 0 Comments

While automating my Proxmox environment with Packer, most of the workflow worked flawlessly: Ubuntu autoinstall, cloud-init, SSH provisioning, and qemu-guest-agent all behaved exactly as expected. But every build consistently failed at the very last step, converting the VM into a template, which was very annoying.

Despite the VM installing perfectly, Proxmox refused to stop it cleanly and returned a persistent lock-related error. This led to a surprisingly long troubleshooting process, which eventually revealed a simple root cause: stale lock files left behind from earlier interrupted builds……sigh

In this post, I’ll share the exact error, the steps I went through to diagnose it, and how cleaning up these old lock files immediately restored stable, repeatable builds, it’s been a few very long days…

Secure LUKS containers on Linux

October 14, 2025 / Michael Waterman / 0 Comments

Lately, I’ve been refining parts of my Linux workflow to make them both more secure and practical. One of those improvements came from something simple but powerful, using encrypted containers instead of relying solely on full-disk encryption.

In this post, I’ll walk you through how I built a secure, self-contained LUKS container on Linux, explain what’s really happening behind the scenes, and share a few lessons learned along the way, including troubleshooting tips and two small Bash scripts that make mounting and unmounting effortless.

Enable RDP hardware acceleration on a Linux VM in Microsoft Hyper-V

March 5, 2025 / Michael Waterman / 6 Comments

How to pass through a GPU and optimize remote performance in Ubuntu

Running a GPU-accelerated remote desktop on a Linux virtual machine (VM) in Microsoft Hyper-V can significantly improve performance for graphical applications, GPU intensive workloads, and even remote testing. However, Hyper-V does not support full PCI passthrough like VMware or Proxmox. Instead, it provides Discrete Device Assignment (DDA), which allows passing a GPU directly to a VM.

Advanced QEMU/KVM Networking on Ubuntu

December 12, 2023 / Michael Waterman / 0 Comments

Transitioning between Operating Systems can be a challenge. Many aspects of what you’re used to work differently and you should expect a learning curve.

Well, that was a weird intro for a blog post that has Linux networking in the title! Actually I’m saying goodby to Windows as my primary system…. yes you read that correctly. It’s not that I don’t like the system anymore, it’s the direction Microsoft is taking with AI and the integration into the OS that made me take this decision.

Managing SUDO from Active Directory

October 21, 2022 / Michael Waterman / 0 Comments

Welcome to the last of a three part series about Ubuntu and Active Directory. In my previous posts I explained how you could, in just a few steps, join an Ubuntu machine to an Active Directory domain and manage it accordingly. This time I’m addressing centralized management of sudo users. Meaning who can execute commands as sudo on managed Linux desktops (in my case Ubuntu).

Advanced Ubuntu Configuration with Active Directory

October 7, 2022 / Michael Waterman / 0 Comments

In the previous blog post I wrote about how to join a Ubuntu 22.04 machine to a Microsoft Active Directory domain. In this follow up post I want to dive a little deeper into the configuration files, a bug I ran into during testing and setting some advanced security settings for access management. The latter is crazy easy actually, keep on reading.

Domain Join Ubuntu 22.04 to Active Directory

October 2, 2022 / Michael Waterman / 0 Comments

Sometimes you’ll be needing a setup that includes both Windows and Linux based machines for managing the infrastructure and data processing. Although joining a Windows machine to an Active Directory domain is fairly simple, joining a Linux based systems requires a little more effort. This posts focusses on joining Ubuntu based nodes (Desktop or Server systems) to a Windows Active Directory domain for simplified management and a unified logon experience.

Five things to do after installing Ubuntu

September 22, 2022 / Michael Waterman / 0 Comments

I’m one of those people that tries to use the best tools to do the job at hand. Linux or Windows, both are great in their own respect, both have strengths, both have downsides. This post isn’t about comparing both operating systems, plenty of opinions around for that. Today I want to share the first tip for Linux as I have used it as my daily driver for a couple of years now.