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.

KubeExp: Putting the 'lab' back in 'Homelab'

So, as I mentioned in my last article, I want to give Kubernetes another try after HashiCorp’s recent license change. This also gives me a chance to put the lab back in Homelab, as it has mostly been a Homeprod environment - not much experimentation going on there, just slow, intentional incremental changes here and there. But my Homeprod env is not really suited for housing a Kubernetes cluster. It mostly consists of Raspberry Pis....

August 27, 2023 · 11 min · Michael

HashiPocalypse?

Basically my entire Homelab is build upon HashiCorp’s products. On August 10th, HashiCorp announced that they would switch all of their products to the BSL, the Business Source License, where they had been licensed under the Mozilla Public License before. From my (rather rudimentary!) understanding, the license basically says that all “non-production” use is perfectly fine. I’m pretty confident that that covers all of my own personal usage. But as it was pointed out to me today, that formulation also creates a lot of uncertainty for commercial entities of all kinds....

August 17, 2023 · 8 min · Michael

Reflecting on 1 year in the Fediverse

I started my Fediverse journey a little over a year ago, with my account creation date being August 3rd, 2022. I was initially drawn to the Fediverse due to the simple fact that this was social media I could host myself. Neat, right? And I want to reflect a little bit on how it’s going. So let’s start with my social media usage in the past, so you can properly classify where the following comments are coming from....

August 6, 2023 · 15 min · Michael

1 Year of Blogging

It has been a whole year since my first blog post. And to my surprise, I’ve kept to it. 😅 Sure, it’s just been a post a month for the most part, but I still managed to write a grant total of 31 posts. And it’s been fun! The blog was born out of the fact that while tinkering with my Homelab, I’ve been reading so many niche blogs of other Homelab enthusiasts who did the same things I was trying to do....

July 22, 2023 · 6 min · Michael

Power Measurements in the Homelab

I’ve long been wondering how much power my Homelab consumes, especially with my switch from a single relatively beefy server to a gaggle of Raspberry Pis. In the end, I put in three smart plugs supporting MQTT. I would have loved to have per-machine power consumption stats, but I didn’t want to invest that much money into smart plugs. To wet your appetite a bit, here is a snapshot of the resulting Grafana dashboard:...

June 13, 2023 · 20 min · Michael