Homelab

I was recently introduced to the excellent Wolf 359 audio drama. It’s the story of the crew of a space station orbiting a distant star, with good humor and interpersonal drama as well as some suspense/horror sprinkled in. I have a small set of other podcasts as well, first and foremost the great British History Podcast. Up to this point, I had mostly listened on my phone, during train rides, but also via my browser during Saturday morning household chores....

I updated my Nomad and Consul clusters recently. Especially Consul was a large jump, getting from 1.13.5 to 1.15.1. After about three days, I suddenly started getting 500: Internal server error from a lot of my services. In this article, I will be going into the debugging process and explain a little bit about what Consul Connect is and how it works. Why Consul Connect? So Consul Connect, or Consul Service Mesh, creates a sort-of overlay network to connect services running on multiple machines, in a secure manner....

I had a random thought today, triggered, by all things, by a short training on Reduce, Reuse, Recycle at work. This is the principle of first looking for the potential to not produce anything. Then to look for a new use for something old that has already been manufactured. And only then, as a final step, to recycle the thing. I, and probably many other Homelabbers, have quite a bit of older hardware laying around....

This is the next post in the Current Homelab series, where I give an overview of what my lab is currently looking like. This time, I will be talking about my storage layer, which is mostly made up of Ceph. I chose Ceph around spring 2021, when I decided to go from a baremetal+docker-compose setup to a VM based setup with LXD. At the time, my main storage consisted of a pair of WD Red 4TB disks for my main storage requirements, and a 60GB crucial SATA SSD for my server’s root FS....

I’ve finally made my decision and bought a server rack. The main reason is this: Those two large cases in the middle house my two Turing Pi 2 boards with four Raspberry Pi CM4s each. I’ve written about them here. The rightmost big tower case houses my “old” x86 server, which I’m retiring soon. The elongated black case with the fan grill in the front on the shelf is an Odroid H3, serving as a Ceph storage cluster node....