Homelab

Two second-hand machines, a Raspberry Pi and a dying laptop, turned into a k3s cluster

Intro

In addition to my current homelab setup, I am refurbishing my very-old, unused laptop from my mom and a Raspberry Pi into a k3s setup.

It started as two independent Docker hosts glued together with Portainer agents and hardcoded IPs. It is now a two-node k3s cluster with piloma as the control plane and alomalab as the worker.

Both of this cluster has a sum of 4GB RAM which is less than a single tab of a chromium-based browser and it still can serve up to 2k of media to the whole house.

The Original Setup

— homelab, docker, linux, raspberry-pi

Turning a Raspberry Pi and a laptop nobody wanted into two Docker hosts

Why I Moved the Homelab to Kubernetes

— homelab, kubernetes, k3s, networking, pihole

The Docker setup didn't fail dramatically. It failed by a thousand hardcoded IP addresses

Putting the Apps Back

— homelab, kubernetes, k3s, prometheus, jellyfin

Deployments, DaemonSets, and learning what mixed CPU architectures do to your manifests

Ingress and DNS

— homelab, kubernetes, k3s, ingress, dns, monitoring

Making the cluster reachable by name, debugging the resolution mess that followed, and measuring the result