Homelab

In a previous post, I had noted that due to HashiCorp’s recent decisions about the licensing for their tools, I was thinking about switching away from Nomad as my workload scheduler. Since then, HashiCorp made a change to the Terraform registry’s Terms of Service which only allowed usage with HashiCorp Terraform. This was obviously an action against OpenTOFU, and it reeked of pure spite. That turned my musings about the future of my Homelab from “okay, this leaves a bad taste” to “Okay, I just lost all trust in HashiCorp”....

As I’ve noted in a recent post, I’ve had a problem with my diskless netbooting hosts sometimes needing several boot attempts to come up again. In this article, I will describe a short setup for virtual machines to debug such a problem. I’ve chosen to do it via virtual machines instead of one of my physical hosts because it makes a lot of things easier. Chief amongst those the fact that with a VM, I’m able to look at the boot process a lot more easily than with a physical host, which are all headless in my setup....

I’ve had a problem for quite a while now. As a reminder, I’m booting eight Raspberry Pi CM4 and one Udoo x86 II completely diskless, using boot partitions on NFS, PXE netboot and the Pi’s netboot feature with root disks being supplied by Ceph RBD volumes. If you’re interested in the details, I’ve got an entire series on the setup, as well as a separate article describing the Udoo boot setup....

In the last post of the series on my Kubernetes experiments, I described how to initialize the cluster. In this post, I will go into a bit more detail on what I did once I finally had a cluster set up. Tutorials Never having done anything with Kubernetes before, I started out with a couple of tutorials. The first one was this one. It uses Redis as an example deployment to demonstrate how to use ConfigMaps....

After setting up my lab environment in the previous article, I’ve now also set up the Kubernetes cluster itself, with kubeadm as the setup tool and Cilium as the CNI plugin for networking. Here, I will describe why I chose the tools I did, and how I initialized the cluster, as well as how to remove the cluster when necessary. Tools choice Before setting up a cluster, several choices need to be made....