Homelab

The homelab has started to sprawl out of the tidy little closet it started in, and I began wondering if I could relocate parts of it to a less visible part of the house. The trouble is, that the ethernet connections all converged at this one tiny closet, and the drywall was all buttoned-up and I had no intention of drilling holes to run new cables. The angle was somewhat tricky, where I could fish a cable up the wall, but could not get to it from across the ceiling. At the same time, I could get to that same area through the ceiling, but not down the wall. ...

After reading one book, taking a class, and a couple false starts, Kubernetes was very much in front of me as something I needed to learn. As a long time home-lab herder, often a great way for me to learn is to get hands-on. So I decided to build a new lab and start migrating some services to it. With just a little bit of research and talking to some knowledgeable folks, I landed on using K3s on a three node cluster on fan-less hardware backed with a PostgreSQL database somewhere off-cluster. ...

As I look to reduce the number of touch points that are required to make a change to my personal system, I’m always thinking about how to reduce complexity and leverage existing tooling. In this way, we can continue to leverage an existing foundation to build out further abstractions. One such lever I have worked on over the last year was using my gRPC protobuf definitions to generate LDAP schema files that could be loaded into the server to match the objects that I’d be working with in Go. ...

A few years ago, I started dabbling with the ESP chips that have become so popular. For me, the ease of WiFi, and the Arduino compatibility meant that I was able to get up and running much faster. Not having a background in electrical engineering, the simple things like having a good base with the PCB, a couple sensors built-in and easy expansion makes all the difference. Before the ESP chips, I’d tried several other wireless communication chips that were each challenging in their own way. Since my ultimate goal is to report the sensor data to a monitoring service, getting up the stack so that I could use IP communication was a big win, and the ESP chips are perfect for this. ...