Homelab

So, it’s been a while and I have made some progress worth sharing! After keeping an eye on the auction sites for a while I ended up pulling the plug and buying 2 12TB Seagate Ironwolf drives for my NAS and now wanted to get started with setting this up. The hardware Off a recommendation from Joe at Late Night Linux I picked up a HP 290 G2 I5-8500. It comes with 8GB of RAM and a 256ssd. The form factor is reasonably nice and it fit the two drives perfectly and it’s been chugging along well. ...

Aims Today’s goal was to deploy Gitea on my K3s cluster, ensuring that: It used persistent storage via my NAS. It was accessible externally through Traefik. It could eventually replace GitHub for my FluxCD setup. What I Did Storage and Permissions Woes Running Gitea as a stateless container worked fine initially, but as soon as I introduced persistence, things got tricky. I ran into permission issues almost immediately, thanks to the interplay between Kubernetes’ user permissions and my NAS file system. ...

Aims The goal for today was to get my first piece of software running on the cluster, ensuring that: It leveraged the NAS for storage. It was accessible externally via Traefik. The process was repeatable for future deployments. I chose the Unifi Management Console as my first self-hosted application. Once migrated, I could wipe my Raspberry Pi 4, which was previously running the console, and add it as a worker node to the cluster. ...

After going back and forth multiple times and making plenty of mistakes, I finally managed to set up a new K3s control plane and node. It turned out to be relatively straightforward once I got the steps right, so I’m documenting this for future reference! Aims The goal was to set up a fresh K3s cluster, ensuring that: The control plane and node are configured correctly. Flux is properly bootstrapped to manage cluster state. Common pitfalls are documented to save time in the future. What I Did Control Plane Setup Install K3s: curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh Add an SSH key for Flux to connect to GitHub. Bootstrap Flux with Git: flux bootstrap git \ --url=ssh://git@github.com/<your-repo> \ --branch=main \ --private-key-file=/home/<user>/.ssh/<flux_key> \ --path=clusters/k3s Retrieve the control plane token: cat /var/lib/rancher/k3s/server/token Allow traffic on the K3s API port: iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6443 -j ACCEPT Node Setup To join a new node to the cluster: ...

Setting Up Storage for the Kubernetes Cluster The first step in setting up my homelab Kubernetes cluster is ensuring some reliable data storage. Right now, I have two main categories of data in mind: 1. Operationally Critical Data Needs RAID with redundancy Requires both on-site and off-site backups Approximately 1TB of data 2. Media Data Non-critical, so no backups required Several terabytes of storage needed Since the Kubernetes cluster depends on Operationally Critical Data, I need to establish a RAID-backed storage solution with proper backups before moving forward. ...

Why I’m Migrating My Self-Hosted Services I’ve decided to migrate all my existing self-hosted services—and add a few new ones—to a Kubernetes (K8s) cluster that I’m going to build. There are several motivations behind this decision: Learning Kubernetes Beyond Ephemeral Clusters My role as an Engineering Manager at Syntasso involves a lot of K8s development using Kind, but these environments are entirely ephemeral. I want to experience the long-term challenges of operating a cluster to build greater empathy for our customers. I want to deepen my understanding of Kubernetes, particularly in areas like: Hardening a K8s cluster Managing multiple clusters effectively Increased Focus on Self-Hosting The British government’s baffling approach to tech privacy has pushed me toward self-hosting more of my personal services. My current setup is a mix of manually configured systems and Docker Compose-based services running on different machines. It’s time to bring structure to the chaos. The Plan Time Constraints and Approach I’m a dad with two small kids, so my time for this project is limited. My approach will be: ...