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.
Latest
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.
homelab-journey
Cluster Observability Part 1: Prometheus and Node Exporter on Talos
Installing Prometheus and node exporter on Talos Linux: namespace labelling, values files, the duplicate pod gotcha, and confirming all four nodes are being scraped.
Longhorn
Longhorn Deep Dive: Replicas, Versions, and Upgrades
The decisions behind the Longhorn installation: why 2 replicas on a 1Gb cluster, how version pinning protects reproducibility, and when to upgrade.
Longhorn
Setting Up Longhorn Storage on the Bletchley Cluster
Installing Longhorn distributed storage on a Talos Linux cluster: NVMe preparation, Helm install, and why the namespace label matters before anything else.
Talos Linux
Upgrading Talos Linux Nodes: Adding a Missing Extension
How I discovered a missing system extension before it caused problems, and upgraded all four Bletchley cluster nodes in 15 minutes. Plus: what changes when you have running workloads.
TuringPi
Building the Bletchley Cluster: Installing Talos Linux on TuringPi 2
Complete guide to installing Talos Linux v1.12.4 on TuringPi 2 RK1 modules — VLAN configuration, HA control plane, and every command along the way.
Talos
Installing Talos Linux on TuringPi RK1: Learning from My First Attempt
Documentation isn't optional. How I lost access to my working Talos cluster and why I'm reinstalling from scratch with proper documentation.
PostgreSQL
Upgrading PostgreSQL: From 12 to 18 on RHEL8
PostgreSQL 12 reached EOL in November 2024. Here's how I upgraded to PostgreSQL 18 using the dump-and-restore method on RHEL 8.
Lessons Learned
What I Learned Installing Umami: Database Decisions and Docker
Seven lessons from installing Umami analytics: database compatibility, EOL software risks, Docker isolation, and why documentation is as valuable as code.