sgarland.dev

K8s Misadventures, Pt. 1 - Distributed Systems are Easy

It’s finally happening - I’m splitting compute and storage up, and using k8s to do so. I bought two more Dell R620s, bringing my total to three - behold, quorum. This will be a multi-part series, focusing on different things I did wrong. I want HA, or as close as I can. I know I still have SPOF with power (aside from my UPS), internet, and switching, but my real concern is the ability to drop a node and not notice....

Testing VM immutability, secrets storage again, and a brief ode to ZFS

I’ve had my dev VM upgraded to Debian 11 for a few months, and have fiddled with from time to time. It’s not that I distrust Debian stable in the slightest to not be stable, but I also am not going to just throw prod a sudo apt full-upgrade (yes, with updating sources first…) and hope for the best. As I didn’t experience any issues with workflow with the upgraded VM, I decided it was time to bake some new images....

Reluctant Servers

I may have mentioned this before, but I have two nearly identical Supermicro 2Us. One is the main server that hosts VMs under Proxmox to do various tasks - a NAS, a Docker host, jumpbox, etc. The other came about because I discovered that its motherboard hardware revision level was too old to support Xeon v2 (Ivy Bridge), even with an updated BIOS. I wanted the lower thermals that v2s offered, so I bought a newer motherboard, and then got another 2U case to throw the old motherboard and CPU into....

A Modest Proposal for minimizing downtime and adding more blinkenlights to ye olde 25U rack

In case you haven’t been following my work (I absolutely can’t blame you, as this blog is self-congratulatory at best), I have a 25U rack with some stuff in it. In short, it consists of a Supermicro 2U X9, and a ZFS pool, with an almost-identical second Supermicro 2U X9 that exists as a cold spare, and a ZFS backup target. There’s also a Dell R620 1U that I’ve done absolutely nothing with yet beyond installing Proxmox....

Baking VMs to Perfection

I’ve now accomplished one of my previously-mentioned desires, namely, to use Packer to make VMs for Proxmox. After much battling with YAML and esoteric bash commands, I have succeeded in being able to spawn endless VMs, ready to go just how I like them. As with many projects I’ve done, this was thanks to someone else’s hard work; I merely customized it. The repo[s] are in two parts, and for my forks, only the Debian template has been customized....