Next step in the Talos Linux cluster setup is to get storage provisioning working on my Synology NAS!

After setting up the cluster I needed to boot it from the Flux repository using our GitOps setup. I ran into a few issues with Talos Linux not being healthy.

Its now time to get a production grade cluster running with Talos Linux!

The final part of this series is to get the workers running and to configure connections to the cluster via kubectl.

Continuing with the series, next is to get encryption setup and to bootstrap the etcd datastore and cluster controllers.

This week I have been working through the Kubernetes The Hard Way series. I setup resources and configured certs and kubeconfigs for infrastructure.

In preparation for working through the “Kubernetes the Hard Way” series, I need to configure my 4 host machines… with Ansible.

The last module in my LFCS prep… storage management!

A core part of any SysAdmin, SRE or DevOps role! Networking is up next in my LFCS prep…

Continuing with LFCS prep, we are moving on to user and group management…

Understanding VMs and containers, and how to manage them in Linux, is an important skill to master.

Running periodic tasks can be very helpful with system maintenance, or application development tasks. Linux uses cron jobs for this.

Log files give you insight into your system and are very important for SRE and DevOps.

Managing Linux processes is critical for DevOps and Linux administration!

File redirection is a core part of Linux, this post covers file stdin, stdout, stderr and other commands.

Continuing with the LFCS preparation series, this post covers various commands, including sed (stream editor), bundling and compression.

This post covers the commands for finding files on your system and searching the contents of files for patterns.

A summary of the commands learnt in the essentials section of the LFCS course preparation.

The Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) exam is a 2 hour performance based exam in which you solve multiple issues from the command line.

If we update our container registry with a new image, or a 3rd party app in our cluster needs updating… that’s something to automate!

In the last post we port forwarded to the Grafana service, but that kinda sucks.

Visibility and monitoring of our homelab will be done by installing a helm chart called kube-prometheus-stack.

In the last post we manually created a Cloudflare secret directly using kubectl, which goes against what we are trying to achieve with GitOps…

The linkding app is now running on our cluster, but in order to make it useful it would be good to expose it to the internet.

In order to persist any data that will be generated be linkding, we need to make sure that we have persistent storage.

After setting up Flux on the cluster, its time to put it to use! I’ll be deploying an app called Linkding, which is a bookmark manager.

Today I installed Flux onto the cluster in order to implement GitOps for my homelab.

I’ve completed the install of a high availability K3S cluster onto the 5 Optiplex machines. Had one or two issues, that meant I had to reinstall with a new secret, but otherwise was pretty smooth!

To start the homelab I’ve completed the installation of Ubuntu Server onto the 5 Dell Optiplex mini-pcs that will be running my Kubernetes homelab.

Yesterday I set out to work through getting disk encryption configured on one of the 5 OptiPlex 7040 Mini PCS that arrived yesterday. I will be setting up my homelab with these machines and want to make sure I have mastered the process of disk partitioning and encryption.

Last week I decided to ditch NixOS, as it was getting in the way of my work. I’ve setup a Fedora based distribution called Bluefin, which went smoothly but has taken some getting used to. There are things that have been great, and some not so much, mainly due to the desktop environment, which I’ll need to resolve.

18 months on NixOS… and I’m done. I’m moving to Bluefin. I loved the idea of NixOS, a declarative, reproducible, git tracked OS.

K3S is a lightweight version of Kubernetes and is used for running on resource constrained environments.

In this post, I’ve tried to outline the purpose of building an online presence and personal brand. My goals are to grow my brand as a Software and DevOps engineer, but that doesn’t preclude this being used for any other type of career, digital or otherwise.

CQRS can help you break up your solutions into logical parts that reduce the contextual burden, making your software more understandable and your job easier.

I’ve been using vim for close to 10 years, in various forms, vim, nvim, vscode extensions.

After 14 years as a software developer, I still wasn’t a true touch typist, I would hen-peck my way through my work, I managed but it was not optimal.