After finally finishing my series on netbooting Raspberry Pis, the initial trigger for creating this blog, I want to give an overview of what my current Homelab is looking like. In this article, I will provide an overview of the hardware and hosts that I currently have. The next one will be about the stack I’m using, with a bit more detail on my storage solution, Ceph, and my cluster running Nomad, Consul and Vault....
I’m currently planning to switch my Homelab to a cluster of eight Raspberry Pi CM4 modules with two Turing Pi 2 boards. That means a full switch to the aarch64/ARM processor architecture. But not all software supports aarch64 yet. So I went looking for a small x86 machine which doesn’t cost too much, doesn’t take too much space, and doesn’t consume too much power. What I found was the Udoo x86 II Ultra....
I’m currently on my way home for a family visit and a weekend with friends. I’m sitting in the first class carriage of an Deutsche Bahn ICE train. Internet is working as expected while surfing. A little bit slow, and I’m getting timeouts from time to time. But it’s workable. The problem started after I enabled my WireGuard VPN to connect to my Homelab. Initially, it works okay, but then everything just stops....
Finally, the Netboot Raspberry Pi series concludes with this post. I will be going over both, what figuring out the actual netboot and blogging about it was like. If you’ve followed this series, I’m hoping that you’ve learned a lot more than “just” how to produce an image that can netboot a Raspberry Pi 4. For me, the information on the side, like how the initramfs works in the Linux boot process, was more interesting than then netboot itself....
This is the fifth part of my Raspberry Pi netboot series. The introduction with an overview and links to previous articles can be found here. In this post, we will go over the Ansible playbook I use to provision my Pis. This playbook’s intention is not to fully provision the Pi for use, e.g. it will not set up Nomad or Ceph. It will only prepare the image to netboot and set up my normal Ansible user for my main provisioning Ansible playbooks, to be executed after first boot....