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....
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....
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....
It’s coarse and rough and irritating and… it sucks. There’s a reason why cloud providers are wildly popular. Scaling in AWS is incredibly easy; not so much when you’re rolling your own. God help you if you’re doing this by cobbling together disparate groups of enterprise and consumer hardware. Oh wait, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’ve had a Linux box since 2016 or so. I mean, I dual-booted every distro known to man with Windows when I was a teenager (including bootstrapped Gentoo, and I managed to get a crotchety HP printer to work with it), but I didn’t have a dedicated Linux box until then....