The Tinkerbell logo. It shows the word 'tinkerbell' in cursive font and a gold star in a blue circle.

Tinkerbell Part II: Lab Setup

A description of my lab setup for tinkering with Tinkerbell. This is part 2 of my Tinkerbell series. For my Tinkerbell tinkering lab Actually, no. Let’s start with: How did I not come up with “tinkering with Tinkerbell” until the second post of this series? You may tsk tsk tsk disapprovingly at your screen now. For my Tinkerbell tinkering lab, I decided to run it on my desktop machine. This is because previous work on network booting has shown that I definitely want direct access to the netbooting machine’s TTY. And that’s easiest when it runs on my desktop. Also makes stuff like packet capturing easier. So I needed the following things in my lab setup: ...

June 12, 2025 · 16 min · Michael
The Tinkerbell logo. It shows the word 'tinkerbell' in cursive font and a gold star in a blue circle.

Tinkerbell Part I: The Plan

A rough overview of my plan for trialing tinkerbell in my Homelab. This is part 1 of my tinkerbell series. I’m planning to trial tinkerbell in my Homelab to improve my baremetal provisioning setup. This first post will be the plan and the reason why I’m doing this. Tinkerbell is a system for provisioning baremetal machines. It is deployed into a Kubernetes cluster and consists of a controller, a DHCP/netboot server, a metadata provider e.g. for cloud-init data, and an in-memory OS for running workflows. The basic idea is that new machines netboot into that in-memory OS and execute workflows configured in tinkerbell to install the actual OS. ...

May 29, 2025 · 7 min · Michael