At the beginning of August 2022, I made my first steps in the Fediverse after setting up my very own Mastodon instance at social.mei-home.net. I wrote about my initial impressions after a couple of days here. And because there’s another large movement to the Fediverse after Elon Musks takeover of twitter has finally become official, I thought I would write down my impressions after a couple of months on the Fediverse. As that article hints, I was pretty frustrated after the first couple of days. And some of those frustrations are definitely still there. But I’m also somehow still there and enjoying it. 😉 ...

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. The final article will then be an overview of the services I’m running on the cluster. ...

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. Here are the base specs: ...

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. E.g. SSH connections work, but then when I enter tmux for example, everything stops. No clear error message at all. ...

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. ...