Craig Weber

Changelog

I worked on this blog for several hours this weekend, releasing a new post, implementing a couple new features and fixing some bugs. Here are the highlights:

  • Published the first entry in my Homelab series
  • Fixed a bug on iPad that was causing a ~300% zoom
  • Implemented syndication (atom feed)
  • Fixed broken relative links in post snippets
  • Reduced coupling between markdown and site configuration
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Homelab Part I: Hardware

For hardware, I settled on Raspberry Pi 4Bs. They support up to 8GB of RAM (enough power to run the k3s master nodes) and USB 3.0 for fast external SSD I/O. The only downside of the 4Bs is that they require more power than the 3Bs, and the same multiport USB power supplies that could support a 3B cluster couldn’t support a 4B cluster. To solve for this, I decided on PoE hats and a PoE switch. This halves the number of cables that need to be run to each Pi, which makes the Pi cluster that much more enjoyable and easy on the eyes.

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Kubernetes + Raspberry Pi Homelab: Introduction

As I alluded to in my last post, I’ve finally decided to pull the trigger and build my own homelab: a personal computing environment for playing around with new tools and approaches for developing or operating software, including software that is personally useful.

For my homelab, I want to build a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster for hosting my own applications and experimenting with different tools and approaches for operating software. However, bare metal (i.e., not running on a public cloud provider, such as AWS) is a second-class citizen for Kubernetes, so one must bring their own providers for storage, networking, load balancing, ingress (roughly “HTTP/layer-7 routing”), and much more.

One day, I have no doubt that there will be Kubernetes distributions targeting bare metal which are mature, robust, and open source; in the meanwhile, this series will document my efforts to work around those limitations so that others can build their own personal cloud platform more easily (or at least know what they’re considering getting into!).

Next time, I’ll delve into the hardware I’m using for my cluster.

K3s + Tailscale

I’ve recently been working on my Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster. I also use Tailscale for my home VPN (because it’s performant and absurdly easy to setup and configure). I wanted to run Kubernetes services on my VPN using private DNS names (e.g., foo.local) and addresses from the Tailscale address space (e.g., 100.*) as opposed to the host network address space (e.g., 192.168.*).

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