This is a personal blog focused on computer software and hardware. Most projects are implementing software and hardware for a homelab. What is a homelab? I would say a homelab could be a single computer or dozens of computers connected in a network. You can also integrate with computers in the Cloud.
One of the most useful systems to set up in a homelab is shared storage. Making storage available over the network makes it easier to share files and make system backups.
A popular operating system for creating a network storage server is called TrueNAS core which is based on FreeBSD and Linux and uses the OpenZFS file system. Check out a previous post if you are not familiar and want to set it up.
As of April 18, 2023 Fedora 38 is available. Compared to the previous release, Fedora 37, there are not a large amount of changes that a desktop user will notice. This release includes the GNOME desktop version 44 which includes a new lock screen, new “background” apps settings menu and they reduced the default grace period given to processes when you shut down your system which will make sure your system powers off quickly.
In a previous post I deployed a factorio game server using docker. The same image can be deployed onto kubernetes.
In order to proceed, you must have a k8s platform, the kubectl command line utility, and a persistent provider. If you are not familiar with kubernetes, check out a previous post to get started.
In order to deploy factorio onto a kubernetes cluster, the deployment needs to be configured in YAML format document.
It is important to keep your computers up to date with the latest software and security updates. Running Kubernetes requires some kind of underlying system to run the containers. If you are not familiar with Kubernetes or containers, check out a previous post to get started.
In a previous post, I looked at a tool, Ansible, to run common tasks on many systems at once. I still use Ansible to patch all of my systems every month. Rebooting kubernetes nodes during this patching playbook works but takes a while and I have yet to add in steps to migrate containers off of a host before rebooting it.
The Longhorn project is simplified, easy to deploy and upgrade, open source, persistent block storage on the Kubernetes platform. If you are not familiar with Kubernetes (k8s), check out a previous post to get started. If you are using Kubernetes in a homelab which is what I focus on in this blog, you may notice that setting up apps that worked well in Docker are much more challenging in Kubernetes. It is very easy to set up static web apps in Kubernetes as the container image includes all the files you need. However there are a ton of open-source apps out there that obviously need some way to persist data, whether you want a simple to-do list or something complex like an app to access your personal documents, music, pictures, videos, etc.
My homelab has evolved quite a bit over time. After implementing a wiki, I have tracked servers and services deployed there. In 2023 I have not done much in the homelab because I moved across my country. Fortunately the only equipment that died during the move was a Raspberry Pi 3b.
Last “homelab update” post was August 2022
Notable addition in 2023 was a migration from a Unifi USG to a Unifi UDM (Dream Machine Pro).