Pi

I’ve had problems with the stability of my Kubernetes control plane ever since I migrated it to three Raspberry Pi 4 from their temporary home on a beefy x86 server. I will be going into more detail about the problem first, describe the Pi 5 with NVMe a bit, and then describe the migration itself. The problem I’ve noted in a couple of the last posts that I’ve started seeing instability in my Kubernetes control plane. The main symptom I saw were my HashiCorp Vault Pods going down regularly. This was pretty visible because I have not automated unsealing for Vault, so each time the Pods are restarted, I have to manually enter the unseal passphrase. ...

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. ...

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). ...

Today, I wanted to migrate my single Ceph NFS daemon from my LXD VM on an x86 server to my Hardkernel H3. This did not work out too well. Yesterday, I had finally finished the migration of my Ceph cluster’s MON daemons to my three Raspberry Pi controllers. This move had it’s own problems, which I will detail a bit in another blog entry. Part of this migration was to also move over the MGR daemons to my Pis. This actually worked without any problem - I thought. ...

I am currently working on distributing my Homelab a little bit more. My main driver is high availability. Do I need high availability in a homelab setup? No, not really. But I was getting annoyed by having to take down the entire Homelab whenever I was doing an update on my single server. The newest part of that project is my cluster controller. That is the machine running the servers for my Vault, Consul and Nomad cluster. Before the migration, this was yet another LXD VM on my homeserver. Now, it’s a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB. ...