Introduction

Let’s start with the traditional Why ln –help? name question. Well, one rather amusing part of my career in tech is: Whenever I have to create a symlink in Linux, the first thing I do is running ln --help. Because for the life of me, I can never remember whether the link name or the link target comes first in the argument order. That’s true even when I created another symlink just minutes ago…

So why the blog? The answer will be coming in the next days in the form of a series on how to netboot a Raspberry Pi 4 with a Ceph RBD volume. The idea was born from the fact that several people in the Turing Pi 2 community asked for a description of how I did it all. As the setup entailed at least a bit of tinkering, I figure it might be worthwhile to write it down properly and make it available to a wider audience.

In addition, I’m also participating in the #100DaysOfHomeLab challenge. At least for some of the things I’m doing there it would be nice to not be quite as constrained as a tweet, to be able to go into a little bit more detail on technical setups.

Topics will include my Homelab setup with storage provided by Ceph, LXD VMs running everything as well as my Nomad/Consul /Vault cluster running the actual services.

There will also be quite some Raspberry Pi content. But don’t expect too much Maker style content. I’m just using them as servers.

So that’s what you will be getting here: Mostly technical posts about my Homelab setup and potentially some musings about tech in general and possibly a rant or two about my work as a tech lead in a big network infrastructure company.

The plan for the next couple of posts includes the aforementioned netbooted Pi setup series and some general description posts on what my Homelab is currently looking like.