Homelab

In my previous post on the hardware I am using, I mentioned that I don’t like my large Arch Linux x86 server very much. Here, I will be going into the details of the problem I am having and how I solved it. The problem So until not very long ago at all, I only had a single server, with everything running in a couple of Docker containers. Then COVID came, and I decided that extending my homelab would be the perfect hobby for these lockdown times. So I went and bought a beefier server with an Intel 10th Gen CPU and 96 GB of RAM. Then I found LXD and started introducing VMs. I also discovered Ceph and started using it as my storage layer. ...

I’ve just had a major success: My docker-compose like Nomad script can now use the nomad binary with the job run -output command to transform a HCL file into JSON for use in the Nomad API. Before, my tool was using the Nomad API’s /v1/jobs/parse endpoint. This meant that I was not able to make use of any of the HCL2 functions recently introduced. I’m mostly interested in using the file and fileset functions, and I want to tell you why. ...

It took me quite a while to finally get VLANs. In fact, it took me until about the middle of the migration to finally understand them. No idea why, as once I did understand them, they make a lot of sense. In this post, I will be going over my journey from a network with two subnets, the DMZ and everything else, to a more segmented setup with multiple VLANs. ...

In the course of spreading my homelab over a couple more machines, I finally arrived at the Ceph cluster’s MON daemons. These were running on three Ceph VMs on my main x86 server up to now. In this post, I will describe how I moved them to three Raspberry Pis. While the cluster was up the entire time. First, a couple of considerations: MON daemons use on average about 1GB of memory in my cluster My cluster, and most of my services, went down during the migration. So please be cautious if you plan to do your own migration The MON daemons are something of a control plane for Ceph clusters. They hold the MON map of daemons and data locations. Every client which uses the Ceph cluster will use them to access a map of available OSDs to work with. ...

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). ...