Posts
How (not) to debug a Network fault
I moved into my home just over two years ago. Luckily for me, it came prewired for networking. However, most of it is CAT5e, vintage unknown. For most of my time here on 80Mbit Internet, that wasn’t a problem. I happily setup a 1GbE capable network and got on with it. All was fine, until nine months ago, fibre was ran direct into my home; bringing me 3Gbit Internet; naturally, this meant I had to immediately upgrade my entire network to 10GbE capable, because… why not. Alas, this wasn’t the best judgement on my part and if I could do It all again, I’d have gone with 2.5GbE; it’s significantly cheaper, more efficient and less fussy. That a-side all was well… until three months ago.
Disabling eMMC boot on the Raspberry Pi CM4
I recently started exploring a new carrier board for my Raspberry Pi CM4’s and after some deliberation I settled on the DeskPi Super6C which is a neat little board that can host six CM4’s and six NVMe SSD’s! all inside Mini-ITX form factor. The issue is, I wanted to boot from the NVMe and not the built in eMMC on the CM4’s I own…
Routing a Public IP over Wireguard to overcome CGNAT
As I run most of this infrastructure on a 5G hotspot I experienced a limitation from my carrier, they use whats called CGNAT. This is common across cellular networks and now even many fixed line broadband providers. It essentially means you don’t have a public facing routable IP that you can forward ports to internal services on and are left with an RFC1918 address. This will work for any type of closed network really as a punch through. Given I want to expose some services to the outside world I wanted a way to circumvent this restriction without sacrificing too much performance. The tool for the job… Wireguard.
Ingress setup for letsencrypt and traefik on k3s
Now I’ve managed to get many services running on my Kubernetes Pi Cluster, I started running into a new qwerk… How can I get all of these services to be accessible via hostnames on standard ports and with zero maintenance TLS certificates that are recognised by mainstream browsers?
Resilient Raspberry Pi 4 hardware config
Resilient is a bit click-baity, what I really mean is “More resilient than it came out the box”. Firstly lets look at the usual default setup.
Persistent NFS storage on k3s
My oh my, its been quite the adventure the past couple of weeks… i’ve now gotten to the point where things are running, i’m feeling some growing pains, have tweaked the hardware config considerably (as i’ll document in another post) and have reached the point where I needed persistent storage that would survive pod creation/termination/scale up/scale down and node replacement. NFS is something I had a lot of prior experience and infrastructure setup for, so I started there…
Kubernetes on Raspberry Pi OS in 120 seconds
Well its been a few days since I started playing around with the Raspberry Pi’s and trying to figure out what/how Kubernetes will run, let alone how to use it. I’ve discovered some things along the way…
Raspberry Pi 4 Plank of wood Homelab
If you’ve spent the past 70 seconds reading the other two posts on this site, you’ll have heard i’m thinking about how to design and plan this almost pointless, yet fun, homelab experiment.
My chosen Pi 4 router for this experiment.
I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few days (where i’ve been forced to isolate) about how I want to setup my new Pi 4 based Homelab. All the different pieces of infrastructure, mounting hardware, cabling, power consumption profile etc. However there’s one thing that it all starts with. I need some way of bringing the Internet into this little experimental world.
Welcome to mikenet.uk!
This post (and site) has gone up a little later than planned. I got caught up in a short-lived revolution in Central Asia. Alas, welcome to my homelab!