Homelab

This is the next post in the Current Homelab series, where I give an overview of what my lab is currently looking like. This time, I will be talking about my storage layer, which is mostly made up of Ceph. I chose Ceph around spring 2021, when I decided to go from a baremetal+docker-compose setup to a VM based setup with LXD. At the time, my main storage consisted of a pair of WD Red 4TB disks for my main storage requirements, and a 60GB crucial SATA SSD for my server’s root FS....

I’ve finally made my decision and bought a server rack. The main reason is this: Those two large cases in the middle house my two Turing Pi 2 boards with four Raspberry Pi CM4s each. I’ve written about them here. The rightmost big tower case houses my “old” x86 server, which I’m retiring soon. The elongated black case with the fan grill in the front on the shelf is an Odroid H3, serving as a Ceph storage cluster node....

You are about to witness this blog’s first rant. Proceed with caution, or not at all if you’re so inclined. Without further ado: Piss off. No, I don’t need this many machines. I want this many physical machines. Every single one of them was a very conscious decision driven by a clear design goal. Is your standard reaction to somebody excitedly telling you about their newest hobby toy really “do you need this much of your hobby?...

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....

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....