SRE: Noun;

This is very minor tip, but also very useful. Using groups can make your automations a lot cleaner, and as an added bonus, make it much easier to replace devices. In the past I’ve had a couple of sensors die because I was using indoor-rated sensors on my patio and in my garage, and Denver winters were not kind to them. Replacing them was a pain because I was using those sensors to trigger multiple automations. ...

I’ve been coding with AI (specifically Kiro) assistance at work lately. There are a lot of things I like about it, but it took some tuning to make it more useful and less annoying. With kiro, these should be placed in .kiro/steering, either in your home directory for global settings or if you only want them to apply to a single repository, in $REPO_ROOT/.kiro/steering. With VS Code and Copilot, they belong in $REPO_ROOT/.github/prompts. ...

The next thing I’m adding to my cluster is Traefik. In this post, I’ll cover installing Traefik with Argo CD and using Traefik’s built-in basic auth middleware to control access to its control panel. ...

The next gitops task for my home cluster was to make ArgoCD automatically install new applications when I add them to the configuration git repository. In this post, I’m going to show how to set up an Argo CD git generator ApplicationSet and point it at a specific directory in a configuration repository. ...

Now that the cluster is up and has Argo CD controlling application deployment, I’m starting to move my homelab services out of docker-compose stacks and into my k8s cluster. I run MQTT (Eclipse Mosquitto in my case) as a message bus between zigbee2mqtt, zwave-js-ui and Home Assistant, so it’s the first service I’m moving into the k8s cluster. ...

In part five of my kubernetes homelab series, we will install Argo CD into a homelab cluster so we can use gitops practices instead of ad-hoc kubectl commands. This will make it much easier to recreate the cluster exactly if we decide to move it to new hardware or just want to reset things to a known-good state after experimentation. Part 1 - Setting up Talos with a Cilium CNI on proxmox Part 2 Add SSL to Kubernetes using Cilium, cert-manager and LetsEncrypt with domains hosted on Amazon Route 53 Part 3 - Secret Management with SOPS Part 4 - Back up your Talos etcd cluster to a SMB share Part 5 - Install Argo CD Part 6 - Install MQTT into a k8s cluster Part 7 - Add an ArgoCD git generator ApplicationSet Part 8 - Add Traefik to the cluster Why bother with gitops? It’s a homelab, and I’m the only administrator Using gitops to configure your cluster instead of running kubectl apply commands directly makes it possible to reproduce the exact state of the cluster later if you need to revert to a known-good state. ...

In this post, I will show how to access smb shares outside the cluster from a Kubernetes Pod. The example is backing up the etcd cluster in my Talos k8s cluster to a share, but you can use this for any service (like Plex or Jellyfin) that need access to files on a NAS. This is part four of my Homelab Kubernetes series. ...

This is part 3 of my Kubernetes homelab cluster setup series - Secrets Management with SOPS. ...

In part two of this homelab kubernetes setup series, we’re going to install & configure cert-manager to use LetsEncrypt with Route 53 so we can use SSL to connect to our services. Part 1 - Setting up Talos with a Cilium CNI on proxmox Part 2 - Add SSL to Kubernetes using Cilium, cert-manager and LetsEncrypt with domains hosted on Amazon Route 53 Part 3 - Set up Secret Management with SOPS Part 4 - Back up your Talos etcd cluster to a SMB share Part 5 - Install ArgoCD Part 6 - Install MQTT into a k8s cluster Part 7 - Add an ArgoCD git generator ApplicationSet Part 8 - Add Traefik to the cluster The tutorials I’ve seen for using cert-manager with a DNS challenge all use CloudFlare. I have my lab domain on Route 53 so this post will cover that instead. ...

I’ve been meaning to set up a Talos linux kubernetes cluster in my homelab for a while and set one up over the holiday break. Here’s how I did it. ...