deep-dive
The Cost of Saying "I'm Still Here"
Control-plane eMMCs take 13–15 GB a day. Most of it is etcd recording twenty leases saying they're still alive, at about 22 KB a time.
Talos Linux
Exploring Talos Linux: The secure, immutable, and API-managed OS designed for Kubernetes
cluster-observability
Getting etcd's Metrics Out of Talos
etcd on Talos is not a pod, so nothing scraped it. One patch, a restart Talos refuses, a rolling reboot, and alerts so the metrics can't go quiet.
deep-dive
Wear Without Writes
One NVMe's reported wear sped up 4.5× the evening its writes almost stopped. Its spare blocks and error counters say the flash never noticed.
cluster-observability
Teaching Prometheus to Read an eMMC
A flat line can mean a healthy eMMC or a dead collector. An arm64 exporter, eleven tested alert rules and a dashboard that tell the two apart.
deep-dive
The Disk With No S.M.A.R.T.
Six months of drive monitoring pointed at the wrong device. The one doing three times the writes has no S.M.A.R.T. at all.
deep-dive
The Wear That Wasn't
An NVMe alert at 82% used life, on drives with full spare capacity and zero errors. The wear number turned out to be a clock, not an odometer.
homelab-journey
CloudNativePG Part 2: Labeling Nodes and Auditing Existing Workloads
Labeling Bletchley's two boards for CloudNativePG, auditing existing workloads for the same partition risk, and confirming there's room for it.
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.
homelab-journey
Cluster Observability Part 5: Hardware Health Collectors - ZFS, SMART, and Thermal
Adding ZFS, SMART, and thermal collectors to the Bletchley cluster — and three ARM64 image attempts before finding one that actually works.
homelab-journey
Reflection: 25 Posts and a Cluster I Can Stand Behind
74 days, 25 posts, one Kubernetes cluster. A look back at what got built, what's still to come, and what I learned doing it.
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
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.