homelab-tools
k9s: A Terminal UI for Navigating Your Kubernetes Cluster
k9s gives you an interactive terminal UI for your Kubernetes cluster. I installed it and immediately found a backup job that had been silently failing for eleven days.
Igor
Infrastructure engineer, homelab builder, public learner. I document the real process — commands, errors, and all — so you don't have to learn it the hard way.
homelab-journey
Cluster Observability Part 4: Alerting with Prometheus and Alertmanager
Enabling Alertmanager on the Bletchley cluster: alerting rules, SMTP delivery, end-to-end testing, and two Talos-specific surprises.
homelab-tools
IT-Tools on Bletchley
Deploying IT-Tools on Bletchley: self-hosted dev utilities running as non-root behind Traefik and cert-manager, with a restricted PodSecurity context
homelab-journey
Central Authentication for the Bletchley Cluster: Authelia and ForwardAuth
Adding central authentication to the Bletchley cluster with Authelia: ForwardAuth for Longhorn and Traefik, one session cookie for all services.
homelab-journey
Cluster Observability Part 3: Dashboards for Storage, Kubernetes, and Network
Importing Longhorn, Kubernetes, and resource dashboards onto the Bletchley cluster — and fixing the scrape config that was only collecting from one of four nodes.
homelab-journey
Version Control for the Cluster: Installing Forgejo on Bletchley
Installing Forgejo on Bletchley: self-hosted git, infra/apps repo structure, accidentally committing secrets, SQLite WAL, and a two-layer backup to Garage S3.
homelab-journey
Backup Validation: Restoring from Longhorn Backups
Testing the backup chain: etcd encryption with age, and a full Grafana PVC delete-and-restore to confirm Longhorn backups actually work.
homelab-journey
Offloading Bletchley Backups: Traefik, Wildcard Certs, and rclone
Exposing Garage S3 via Traefik, why Synology Cloud Sync failed, and how rclone solved the offsite backup problem instead.
homelab-journey
Backup Infrastructure: Garage S3, ZFS, and Longhorn Backup Targets
Building the local backup layer for the Bletchley cluster: ZFS mirror on rock3's SATA SSDs, Garage S3, NFS, and Longhorn recurring backups.
homelab-journey
Certificate Management: cert-manager on the Bletchley Cluster
Adding TLS to the Bletchley cluster with cert-manager, TransIP DNS-01 challenges, Let's Encrypt staging and production issuers, and automatic HTTP→HTTPS redirects.
homelab-journey
Cluster Networking: MetalLB and Traefik
Adding MetalLB and Traefik to Bletchley: real IPs for LoadBalancer services, hostname-based routing, and a reader-suggested improvement that preserves source IPs from day one.
homelab-journey
Cluster Observability Part 2: Grafana Dashboards
Adding Grafana to the Bletchley cluster: Longhorn-backed storage, pre-configured Prometheus datasource, and the Node Exporter Full dashboard showing live node metrics.