Category: Home Lab
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Literally every time I go away…
It really truly seems like every time I go away, something funny happens in the lab and stuff goes down. That pattern continued last week. Loads of Travel A previously planned Jamaican getaway butted up against a short-notice business meeting in Austin. Since I could not get a direct flight to either location, I ended…
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Speed. I.. am.. Speed.
“One winner, 42 losers. I eat losers for breakfast. Breakfast? Maybe I should have had breakfast. A little brekie could be good for me….” My quest for speed lead to using 1TB of data every day…
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Going Banana
That’s right… just one banana. I have been looking to upgrade the Raspberry PI 3 that has been operating as home lab’s reverse proxy. While it would have been more familiar to find another Raspberry Pi 4 to use, their availability is, well, terrible. I found a workable, potentially more appropriate, solution in the Banana…
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Speeding up Packer Hyper-V Provisioning
I spent a considerable amount of time working through the provisioning scripts for my RKE2 nodes. Each node took between 25-30 minutes to provision. I felt like I could do better. Check the tires A quick evaluation of the process quickly made me realize that most of the time is spent in the full install…
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A big mistake and a bit of bad luck…
In the Home Lab, things were going good. Perhaps a little too good. A bonehead mistake on my part and hardware failure combined to make another ridiculous weekend. I am beginning to think this blog is becoming “Matt messed up again.” Permissions are a dangerous thing I wanted to install the Azure DevOps agent on…
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Tech Tips – Moving away from k8s-at-home
Much of what I learned about Helm charting and running workloads in Kubernetes I credit to the contributors over at k8s-at-home. There expansive chart collection helped me start to jump in to Kubernetes. Last year, they announced they were deprecating their repositories. I am not surprised: the sheer volume of charts they had meant they…
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Automated RKE2 Cluster Management
One of the things I like about cloud-hosted Kubernetes solutions is that they take the pain out of node management. My latest home lab goal was to replicate some of that functionality with RKE2. Did I do it? Yes. Is there room for improvement? Of course, its a software project. The Problem With RKE1, I…
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Moving On: Testing RKE2 Clusters in the Home Lab
After recovering from an RKE crash, I figured it was time to look into different Kubernetes options. I ended up with a new offering from a familiar friend.
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Home Lab – No More iSCSI – Backup Plans
This post is part of a short series on migrating my home hypervisor off of iSCSI. It is worth nothing (and quite ironic) that I went through a fire drill last week when I crashed my RKE clusters. That event gave me some fresh eyes into the data that is important to me. How much…
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Nothing says “Friday Night Fun” like crashing an RKE Cluster!
Yes… I crashed my RKE clusters in a big way yesterday evening, and I spent a lot of time getting them back. I learned a few things in the process, and may have gotten the kickstart I need to investigate new Kubernetes flavors. It all started with an upgrade… All I wanted to do was…