Matt Gerega

Category: Technology

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Home Lab – No More iSCSI: Transfer, Shutdown, and Rebuild

    This post is part of a short series on migrating my home hypervisor off of iSCSI. Observations – Migrating Servers The focus of my hobby time over the few days has been moving production assets to the temporary server. Most of it is fairly vanilla, but I have a few observations worth noting. Let me…

  • Installing Minio on a Synology Diskstation with Nginx SSL

    In an effort to get rid of a virtual machine on my hypervisor, I wanted to move my Minio instance to my Synology. Keeping the storage interface close to the storage container helps with latency and is, well, one less thing I have to worry about in my home lab. There are a few guides…

  • Home Lab – No More iSCSI, Prep and Planning

    This post is part of a short series on migrating my home hypervisor off of iSCSI. I realized today that my home lab setup, by technology standards, is old. Sure, my overall setup has gotten some incremental upgrades, including an SSD cache for the Synology, a new Unifi Security Gateway, and some other new accessories.…