Spreading out the Homelab: The Turing Pi 2 Cluster Board

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....

January 29, 2023 · 16 min · Michael

Migrating to 3-node HA for Consul/Vault/Nomad

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)....

December 25, 2022 · 7 min · Michael

Ceph NFS on ARM64: Not currently possible

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....

December 21, 2022 · 4 min · Michael

Cluster Controller Migration to a Raspberry Pi 4

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....

December 10, 2022 · 9 min · Michael

Current Homelab - Hardware

After finally finishing my series on netbooting Raspberry Pis, the initial trigger for creating this blog, I want to give an overview of what my current Homelab is looking like. In this article, I will provide an overview of the hardware and hosts that I currently have. The next one will be about the stack I’m using, with a bit more detail on my storage solution, Ceph, and my cluster running Nomad, Consul and Vault....

October 27, 2022 · 14 min · Michael