New year, new homelab configuration!

Old setup:

• Intel Desktop: k3os
• AMD X300: k3os

Good because: very low overhead. Good utilization of compute resources.

Bad because: not so flexible. Difficult to use for things outside of Kubernetes.

I’m able to run all of my workloads in Kubernetes, but the ability make VMs offers more flexibility. Makes it easier to play with things like pfSense, Security Onion, and other technologies that can’t run in a container. Also felt like my learning was stagnating a bit.

We use Proxmox at work, and I didn’t have much experience with it, so I wanted to have a way to play with it at home.

We also made a TrueNAS thing at work to do backup duties for our Proxmox servers at the data center. Another thing I’d heard about for ages but never played with. Previously I was using Longhorn for my in-cluster storage (which worked very well).

A couple of weeks ago, I made database dumps, ferried off some PV contents, and nuked my cluster. Shortly after, I shuffled some drives around, and installed Proxmox VE and TrueNAS.

And that was how it sat for longer than I’d care to admit. Busy with work and life and easy to procrastinate. But today I did it! Synapse, Mastodon, and WordPress are running again. Still more to rebuild, but today was a very good day.

New setup:

Intel Desktop: TrueNAS

Moved all but one of my drives to this chassis. Currently, REALLY NOT BUSY:

To-Do:

• Off-site Backups to Backblaze – though I am not going to. For PV data to Backblaze, I am going to use the Restic functionality that comes with Velero. Restic does deltas and incremental backups, which I prefer. The cloud backup feature of TrueNAS does not appear to do that. I DID, however, setup daily snapshots for each one of my PV volumes in TrueNAS.
• Play more with its various features
• Add 2x 4TB HDDs
• HBA because only 6 SATA ports on the motherboard. LSI 9207-8i ordered! Coming from China. We’ll see how long it takes to get here (CNY is starting).

AMD X300: Proxmox VE

Got some more RAM the other day, 64G total now. I prefer more, but only two slots. Storage is a 500G m.2 NVME SSD.

Kubernetes is provided by k3s in a Debian VM. Maybe easier to upgrade to newer versions of Kubernetes since I’m not bound to whatever version comes with k3os. Currently running:

• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• Redis
• Elasticsearch
• Synapse
• Mastodon
• WordPress
• SearX

truenas-csp: TrueNAS CORE Container Storage Provider

This was the highlight of my day.

The TrueNAS CORE Container Storage Provider (CSP) is an API gateway to provide iSCSI block storage provisioning using the HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes. It allows you to use TrueNAS CORE to provide persistent storage using iSCSI to Kubernetes.

GitHub

Its amazing! Make a PVC in the cluster, get a dataset in TrueNAS. Wicked cool. Need to do more research to see what else it can do (maybe snapshots?), but so far, so good. Very good.

The instructions were quite easy to follow.

Reddit post.

Later.. MORE NODES!

I got enough cores but not enough RAMs! I’ve been very happy with the X300 thing and I’d like to get something similar again. Waiting for a 5750G (or some nice 65W 5000 AMD APU) to be released. Also wanna play with Proxmox VE clustering capabilities.