homelab-journey
Keeping the Bletchley Cluster Current: Talos, Kubernetes, and Every Helm Chart
Upgrading Talos, Kubernetes, and thirteen Helm charts with real workloads running — the safe order, the tools, and what went wrong. The how, not the what.
Longhorn
Managing cloud-native distributed block storage for Kubernetes with Longhorn.
homelab-journey
Backup Controller v0.11.0: Detecting What Wasn't Created by the Controller
The controller managed its own backups perfectly. It had no idea about the rest. v0.11.0 adds an audit script and two new alert conditions to close that gap.
homelab-tools
stern: Real-Time Log Tailing Across Your Kubernetes Cluster
stern tails logs from multiple Kubernetes pods at once. I used it to find a pending Traefik upgrade and reconstruct a PVC resize across five pod types.
homelab-journey
Closing the Backup Loop: A Custom Controller for Longhorn
New PVCs were silently unprotected until I noticed. I built a label-driven controller to close the loop — jobs created automatically, violations alerted, archives handled.
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.
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
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
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.
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.