Homelabbing: A really nice hobby

You are about to witness this blog’s first rant. Proceed with caution, or not at all if you’re so inclined. Without further ado: Piss off. No, I don’t need this many machines. I want this many physical machines. Every single one of them was a very conscious decision driven by a clear design goal. Is your standard reaction to somebody excitedly telling you about their newest hobby toy really “do you need this much of your hobby?...

February 7, 2023 · 7 min · Michael

Spreading out the Homelab: The Turing Pi 2 Cluster Board

In my previous post on the hardware I am using, I mentioned that I don’t like my large Arch Linux x86 server very much. Here, I will be going into the details of the problem I am having and how I solved it. The problem So until not very long ago at all, I only had a single server, with everything running in a couple of Docker containers. Then COVID came, and I decided that extending my homelab would be the perfect hobby for these lockdown times....

January 29, 2023 · 16 min · Michael

Handling service configuration files in Nomad

I’ve just had a major success: My docker-compose like Nomad script can now use the nomad binary with the job run -output command to transform a HCL file into JSON for use in the Nomad API. Before, my tool was using the Nomad API’s /v1/jobs/parse endpoint. This meant that I was not able to make use of any of the HCL2 functions recently introduced. I’m mostly interested in using the file and fileset functions, and I want to tell you why....

January 12, 2023 · 9 min · Michael

Implementing VLANs in my Homelab: It's all fun and games until the trunk port arrives

It took me quite a while to finally get VLANs. In fact, it took me until about the middle of the migration to finally understand them. No idea why, as once I did understand them, they make a lot of sense. In this post, I will be going over my journey from a network with two subnets, the DMZ and everything else, to a more segmented setup with multiple VLANs....

January 10, 2023 · 18 min · Michael

Ceph MON Migration

In the course of spreading my homelab over a couple more machines, I finally arrived at the Ceph cluster’s MON daemons. These were running on three Ceph VMs on my main x86 server up to now. In this post, I will describe how I moved them to three Raspberry Pis. While the cluster was up the entire time. First, a couple of considerations: MON daemons use on average about 1GB of memory in my cluster My cluster, and most of my services, went down during the migration....

December 26, 2022 · 4 min · Michael