Pi

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. ...

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. The final article will then be an overview of the services I’m running on the cluster. ...

Finally, the Netboot Raspberry Pi series concludes with this post. I will be going over both, what figuring out the actual netboot and blogging about it was like. If you’ve followed this series, I’m hoping that you’ve learned a lot more than “just” how to produce an image that can netboot a Raspberry Pi 4. For me, the information on the side, like how the initramfs works in the Linux boot process, was more interesting than then netboot itself. ...

This is the fifth part of my Raspberry Pi netboot series. The introduction with an overview and links to previous articles can be found here. In this post, we will go over the Ansible playbook I use to provision my Pis. This playbook’s intention is not to fully provision the Pi for use, e.g. it will not set up Nomad or Ceph. It will only prepare the image to netboot and set up my normal Ansible user for my main provisioning Ansible playbooks, to be executed after first boot. ...

This is the fourth part of the Pi netboot series. Find the previous parts from the introductory article here. In this part of the series, I will go over using a combination of HashiCorp Packer and Ansible to create an Ubuntu Linux image for a netbootable Raspberry Pi, using NFS for the boot partition and a Ceph RBD as the root device. The goal here is to show you how to set up Packer and what configuration is needed to run an Ansible playbook in an aarch64 image on a x86_64 machine. While writing the article, I realized that it had already gotten pretty long, so I will move the description of the Ansible playbook as well as the final image deployment to future articles. ...