homelab-journey
CloudNativePG Part 7: Turning Off the Thing You Built Four Months Ago
Deleting the legacy PostgreSQL instance took four commands. Proving it was safe to delete took a day and eleven read-only checks.
PostgreSQL
Best practices for deploying, optimizing, and maintaining PostgreSQL relational databases.
homelab-journey
CloudNativePG Part 6: Migrating Umami Without Losing a Row
Moving a live 10 MB database onto CloudNativePG in under six minutes, and proving the verification harness could actually fail before trusting it.
homelab-journey
CloudNativePG Part 4: Breaking a Throwaway Database on Purpose
Extending Prometheus and Alertmanager to cover CloudNativePG, then chaos-testing failover, node loss, and restores against a throwaway database.
homelab-journey
CloudNativePG Part 3: Installation and Exposing It with MetalLB
Installing CloudNativePG on Bletchley: the Cluster, MetalLB exposure, automated backups, and every real bug hit getting there.
homelab-journey
CloudNativePG Part 1: Planning Highly Available PostgreSQL Across Two TuringPi Boards
Same partition, opposite outcome, depending only on which board the primary happens to be on.
homelab-journey
Fixing a Postgres Backup Failure: Region Mismatch and a Missing NAS Copy
A LogQL finding led to a one-line AWS CLI region fix for postgres housekeeping — and uncovered a second gap: backups never synced to the NAS.
homelab-journey
The Backup That Wasn't: Eight Days, Five Root Causes
A stale Grafana metric, eight days of silent failure, and five root causes that each made sense in isolation. How a backup stopped without anyone noticing.
homelab-journey
PostgreSQL Backups on Kubernetes: Per-Database Dumps, Rotation, and Prometheus Monitoring
Per-database pg_dump to Garage S3, a touch file state machine, daily/weekly rotation, a Go Prometheus exporter, and Alertmanager rules for the PostgreSQL backup system on Bletchley.
homelab-journey
PostgreSQL on Bletchley: First Database on the Cluster
Setting up a shared PostgreSQL 17 StatefulSet on Kubernetes, Traefik TCP routing, an OpenBao v2.5.3 surprise, and migrating the Umami database.
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.
Umami
Adding Analytics to My Blog: The Umami Journey
Privacy-friendly analytics without Google: how I deployed Umami with PostgreSQL in Docker after learning hard lessons about database compatibility.