Homelab

Wherein I migrate my CloudNativePG setup to the Barman Cloud Plugin. During my migration from Nomad to Kubernetes, I started using CNPG for my database needs. For more details, have a look at this post. I configured their backup solution right away. It consists of a component which runs in the same Pod as the main Postgres and backs up both, the Write Ahead Log (WAL) and the full database, all while the instance is kept up and running. Those can then be copied to an S3 bucket for long term storage. ...

Wherein I’m adding Bookwyrm to my Homelab. I used to read novels. A lot. On school days, I would spend the approximately twenty minutes between the end of my morning routine and having to head off with a novel. Ditto for lazy Sunday evenings. During my service as a conscript, I would always find space for a book in my pack when we went on a training exercise. At University, the most difficult decision while packing for a trip home would be judging how many books I would need to pack to ensure I would not run out. ...

Wherein I update my container image build pipeline in Woodpecker with buildah. A couple of weekends ago, I naively thought: Hey, how about stepping away from my Tinkerbell experiments for a weekend and quickly setting up a Bookwyrm instance? As such things tend to turn out, that rookie move turned into a rather deep rabbit hole, mostly on account of my container image build pipeline not really being up to snuff. The current setup Before going into details on the problem and ultimate solution, I’d like to sketch out my setup. For a detailed view, have a look at this post. ...

In this post, I will describe my failed attempts of booting Tinkerbell’s in-memory HookOS directly on a Pi 4, without iPXE or UEFI. This is part 5 of my Tinkerbell series. In my previous post, I described how I provisioned a Pi 4 using Tinkerbell’s standard way via UEFI and iPXE. This was a complicated and convoluted process, requiring heavy use of Dnsmasq on the side and bouncing between requests to said Dnsmasq and Tinkerbell itself. In the end, I was only able to do it after completely switching off Tinkerbell’s DHCP functionality. I wasn’t particularly fond of that option, because I quite liked how it worked for provisioning the VM in my first experiments. I didn’t want to completely switch off DHCP in Tinkerbell just because of the Pi 4. ...

With release 4.4.0 Mastodon introduced a Prometheus exporter. In this post, I will configure it and show the data it provides. With the new release, Mastodon provides metrics from Ruby and Sidekiq. I’ve attached examples for both to this post, see here for Ruby and here for Sidekiq. The information is not actually that interesting, it’s just generic process data. But I did find at least the Sidekiq data worth gathering. It will provide an interesting future look into my usage of Mastodon and perhaps even the activity in the Fediverse (or at least the part I’m connected to) overall. ...