Welcome!

On here, you will mostly find articles on running my home lab, in the hopes that others can benefit from my own trials and tribulations.

Homelab Backup Operator Part III: Running Backups

In the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a k8s operator for running backups of persistent volumes and S3 buckets in my cluster. Previous installments of the series can be found here. And now, I’m finally done with it, and over the weekend, I ran the first successful backups. Time to describe what I’ve implemented, why and how. Recap Let’s start with a recap. For a more detailed description of the problem, have a look at this post in my k8s migration series....

January 10, 2025 · 21 min · Michael
A screenshot of a Grafana visualization titled 'Objects in cluster'. It shows a pretty consistent growth until about October 10th, where the first drop of about 150k objects occurs. Then a far steeper drop follows on October 19th to 21st, straight down from 1.9 million to 1 million. Afterwards, there is regular growth again, but now interspersed with similarly regular drops in the object counts.

Cleaning up my Mastodon Media Cache

I recently randomly wandered onto the Mastodon admin page. What I saw there will shock you. (I’m so sorry about that introduction) That’s perhaps a bit much in the Media storage area for a single user instance. I was pretty sure that I had previously configured Mastodon’s media cache retention to 7 days. Checking up on that, I found that I had remembered correctly. So I dug a bit deeper, and it turns out that the Vacuum failed....

November 27, 2024 · 14 min · Michael

How to configure Mastodon link verification

To distract myself from the fact that the last commit in the repo for my k8s Backup Operator was about one month ago, I decided to tackle a random assortment of tasks. One of them was to finally set up link verification for my Blog on Mastodon. It looks like this when it’s working: My Mastodon profile with the link to this blog properly verified, as indicated by the green check mark....

November 14, 2024 · 3 min · Michael

Homelab Heating?

I’ve been sitting on this topic since last summer, which was the first one during which I’ve had temperature measurements and history available for my living room. Said living room is also where my Homelab lives, right next to my desk. I’ve never really minded that, but it sitting right next to me most of the time was one factor in deciding to go with low-power Raspberry Pis instead of a couple of Enterprise grade servers....

August 21, 2024 · 5 min · Michael
The HashiCorp Nomad and Kubernetes logos, connected with an arrow pointing from Nomad to Kubernetes

Nomad to k8s, Part 13: Almost one year

Wherein I realize that I’ve been at this for almost a year now. This is part 14 of my k8s migration series. It has been quite a while since I last wrote a blog post about the migration. And I’ve realized today that it’s been almost a year since I made the decision to switch over to Kubernetes for my Homelab. On the 17th of August 2023, I posted about the HashiPocalypse....

August 15, 2024 · 4 min · Michael