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.
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.
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.
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 2023 Notable addition in 2023 was a migration from a Unifi USG to a Unifi UDM (Dream Machine Pro).
Ubuntu 22.04 was released in 2022 and is a long term support server Linux distribution. We can reasonably expect the publishers of Ubuntu to maintain security and kernel updates for Ubuntu until 2027. This distribution is a good choice for using as a base template for virtual machines. If you are not familiar with creating virtual machine templates for Proxmox, check out a previous post that is more focused on getting started.
For linux distribution Fedora version 37 and newer, if you are using an AMD graphics card (gpu), the main package repositories no longer provide the drivers needed to decode video streams in browsers and other applicationns that utilize libraries such as vdpau. Fortunately along with other non-free software such as codecs, the RPMFusion repository can be added to your system to install the drivers needed to decode videos using your GPU.
As of November 15, 2022 Fedora 37 is available. Compared to the previous release, Fedora 36, there are not a large amount of changes that a desktop user will notice. The newest release brings newer versions of the Linux Kernel and GNOME 43 if you use the GNOME desktop environment. If you like running virtual machines, this release includes an image all prepared for running in the Linux KVM hypervisor.