A screenshot of the Stellaris entry in my Steam library, with 419 hours total played and 27 hours in the past two weeks.

Back to Gaming: Stellaris

Since I started with the Kubernetes Migration in my Homelab last December, It had gotten a tad bit monomaniacal, spending my free time only on the migration, and almost nothing else. So by beginning of March, I hadn’t even launched Steam in three months, let alone played anything. To remedy that, I went ahead and didn’t just chose any game. Oh no, I chose one of my all-time favorites: Stellaris. It is a game in one of my favorite genres, Grand Strategy or 4x, whichever you prefer....

March 24, 2024 · 11 min · Michael
The HashiCorp Nomad and Kubernetes logos, connected with an arrow pointing from Nomad to Kubernetes

Nomad to k8s, Part 9: Prometheus

Wherein I set up Prometheus for metrics gathering in the k8s cluster. This is part 10 of my k8s migration series. Let me tell you something about me: I love metrics. And pretty charts. The more the better. Back in 2020, setting up Prometheus+Grafana was what brought me to Homelabbing as a hobby, instead of just a means to an end, running some services I wanted to use. I had just gotten an updated ISP connection and found my old FritzBox not working anymore....

March 15, 2024 · 18 min · Michael
The HashiCorp Nomad and Kubernetes logos, connected with an arrow pointing from Nomad to Kubernetes

Nomad to k8s, Part 8: Setting up CloudNativePG for Postgres DB Support

Wherein I set up cloud-native-pg to supply Postgres clusters in my k8s cluster. This is part nine of my k8s migration series. PostgreSQL is currently the only DBMS in my Homelab. My initial plan was to just copy and paste the deployment over from my Nomad setup. But then I was pointed towards CloudNativePG, which is an operator for managing Postgres deployments in Kubernetes. But before I go into details on CloudNativePG, a short overview of my current setup in Nomad....

February 29, 2024 · 18 min · Michael
The HashiCorp Nomad and Kubernetes logos, connected with an arrow pointing from Nomad to Kubernetes

Nomad to k8s, Part 7: Ansible Plays for Host Updates

Wherein I add the Kubernetes nodes to my host update Ansible playbook. This is part eight of my k8s migration series. With the number of hosts I’ve now got in my Homelab, I definitely need a better way to update them than manually SSH’ing into each. So a while ago, I created an Ansible playbook to update all hosts in my Homelab. These updates are also one of the reasons I keep so many physical hosts, even if they’re individually relatively small: I want an environment where I can take down any given host for updates without anything at all breaking, and especially without having to take the entire lab down before a regular host update....

February 17, 2024 · 10 min · Michael

NFS problems with new Ubuntu 22.04 kernel

Yesterday’s Homelab host update did not at all go as intended. I hit a kernel bug in the NFS code. To describe the problem, I need to go into a bit of detail on my setup, so please bear with me. I’ve got a fleet of 8 Raspberry Pi CM4 and a single Udoo x86 II forming the backbone of the compute in my Homelab. All of them do netbooting, with no per-host storage at all....

February 17, 2024 · 6 min · Michael