Migrating to 3-node HA for Consul/Vault/Nomad

As mentioned in my previous post on migrating the Consul/Vault/Nomad servers from a VM to a Raspberry Pi, I was still waiting for some more Pis to arrive to extend the Nomad/Consul/Vault clusters to a HA configuration for all three. The main reason for this is not necessarily fault tolerance, but rather gaining the ability to restart the controllers without taking down the entire Nomad cluster. Now I’d like to give a short overview of the experience, and end with a bit of an overview on the resource consumption (spoiler: Raspberry Pi 4 4GB are absolutely sufficient). ...

December 25, 2022 · 7 min · Michael

Ceph NFS on ARM64: Not currently possible

Today, I wanted to migrate my single Ceph NFS daemon from my LXD VM on an x86 server to my Hardkernel H3. This did not work out too well. Yesterday, I had finally finished the migration of my Ceph cluster’s MON daemons to my three Raspberry Pi controllers. This move had it’s own problems, which I will detail a bit in another blog entry. Part of this migration was to also move over the MGR daemons to my Pis. This actually worked without any problem - I thought. ...

December 21, 2022 · 4 min · Michael

Cluster Controller Migration to a Raspberry Pi 4

I am currently working on distributing my Homelab a little bit more. My main driver is high availability. Do I need high availability in a homelab setup? No, not really. But I was getting annoyed by having to take down the entire Homelab whenever I was doing an update on my single server. The newest part of that project is my cluster controller. That is the machine running the servers for my Vault, Consul and Nomad cluster. Before the migration, this was yet another LXD VM on my homeserver. Now, it’s a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB. ...

December 10, 2022 · 9 min · Michael
The Mastodon logo of the tooting elephant

Fediverse: (Almost) Three months in

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. 😉 ...

October 30, 2022 · 6 min · Michael

Current Homelab - Hardware

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. ...

October 27, 2022 · 14 min · Michael