Pi

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. ...

In this post, I will show how I provisioned a Raspberry Pi 4 with an attached USB SSD via Tinkerbell. This is part 4 of my Tinkerbell series. The main goal of this post is to get this little guy to boot into Tinkerbell’s HookOS and install an Ubuntu 24.04 Raspberry Pi image onto the SSD: My experimental setup. ...

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). ...