The HashiCorp Nomad and Kubernetes logos, connected with an arrow pointing from Nomad to Kubernetes

Nomad to k8s, Part 1: Setting up external-secrets

This is the second post in my k8s migration series. I will skip the cluster setup itself in this series, as I did not make many changes compared to my experimental setup. Instead I will start with my very first deployed service, external-secrets. Motivation In my initial experimentation, I decided to not go with any secrets management and instead use Helmfile’s secret handling. But I’ve come around to the fact that having some sort of service which can automatically take in secrets from my Vault instance would be pretty nice to have....

December 26, 2023 · 14 min · Michael
The HashiCorp Nomad and Kubernetes logos, connected with an arrow pointing from Nomad to Kubernetes

Nomad to k8s, Part 0: The Plan

In a previous post, I had noted that due to HashiCorp’s recent decisions about the licensing for their tools, I was thinking about switching away from Nomad as my workload scheduler. Since then, HashiCorp made a change to the Terraform registry’s Terms of Service which only allowed usage with HashiCorp Terraform. This was obviously an action against OpenTOFU, and it reeked of pure spite. That turned my musings about the future of my Homelab from “okay, this leaves a bad taste” to “Okay, I just lost all trust in HashiCorp”....

December 18, 2023 · 11 min · Michael
A screenshot of a Wireshark packet capture showing some TCP retransmissions

Interlude: Setting up a VM to work on netboots

As I’ve noted in a recent post, I’ve had a problem with my diskless netbooting hosts sometimes needing several boot attempts to come up again. In this article, I will describe a short setup for virtual machines to debug such a problem. I’ve chosen to do it via virtual machines instead of one of my physical hosts because it makes a lot of things easier. Chief amongst those the fact that with a VM, I’m able to look at the boot process a lot more easily than with a physical host, which are all headless in my setup....

November 28, 2023 · 7 min · Michael

Investigating my Netboot problems

I’ve had a problem for quite a while now. As a reminder, I’m booting eight Raspberry Pi CM4 and one Udoo x86 II completely diskless, using boot partitions on NFS, PXE netboot and the Pi’s netboot feature with root disks being supplied by Ceph RBD volumes. If you’re interested in the details, I’ve got an entire series on the setup, as well as a separate article describing the Udoo boot setup....

November 16, 2023 · 5 min · Michael

Europa Barbarorum and Linux Gaming

I’ve been a gamer for all my life, and I’ve been using Linux as my main OS since I started studying computer science and thought to myself “every self-respecting CS student should run Linux”. (I was young and deeply into CS nerd culture okay? It was a different time! 😉) For a long time, those two things, Linux and gaming, didn’t really go together, at least as long as you were a mainstream gamer....

November 11, 2023 · 10 min · Michael