SRE: Noun;

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 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 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. ...

After 19 years of hosting email for my domains on Google Workspace (I was an early internal tester when it was still Google Apps) I finally moved my domains to proton.me last month when they had a Cyber Monday sale. There were a lot of reasons that boiled down to: I no longer trust Google to not use my data to train Gemini. I pay less for 500GB worth of storage for proton services than I did for 30GB on Google. And proton includes a VPN as part of my package’s services. Proton is a non-profit, so I don’t have to worry about them deciding to sell my data to prop up the stock price in a down quarter. If you have a proton email account but you haven’t already started importing email into proton, don’t kick that off until you read this - it’s what I wish I had known when I was setting up my account. If you don’t have one but are considering one, here’s a referral link that will get you two weeks for free and $20 off of your first bill. Disclaimer - I get $20 in credit too. ...

I’ve been experimenting with running Talos in my home lab. I really like the idea of an immutable OS layer under Kubernetes and wanted to stand up a cluster to run some of my services that are currently run with docker-compose. I decided to use my Synology to store k8s volumes, here’s how I set that up. ...

So here’s a fun macOS weirdness I ran into this weekend where I couldn’t connect to a port on another machine from a shell session inside of iTerm, even though I was able to ssh to other hosts. ...

Here’s the current (as of 2025-09-30) version of my shrimp food recipe. ...

Building a Debian 13 (Trixie) LXC Template for Proxmox Debian 13 (trixie) was released, but (at least as of 2025-08-12) there isn’t a LXC template available for it on proxmox. I wanted a Debian 13 LXC container, so I made a template of my own. Install tooling We’re going to use Debian Appliance Builder to create a Debian 13 LXC template. First, install the tooling: apt update apt install -y dab wget Download Debian 13 configuration mkdir dab cd dab # Get the debian 13 dab configuration wget -O dab.conf "https://git.proxmox.com/?p=dab-pve-appliances.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian-13-trixie-std-64/dab.conf;hb=HEAD" # Get a Makefile to make builds easier wget -O Makefile "https://git.proxmox.com/?p=dab-pve-appliances.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian-13-trixie-std-64/Makefile;hb=HEAD" Build the template Now we can build a template. ...