Volsync

Talos is amazing and if you want to start from a fully automated setup (GitOps, Renovate), I highly recommend using https://github.com/onedr0p/cluster-template

Glad you found your ideal selfhosting setup!

Enjoy!

Dococd + renovate goes brrr

Docker Compose is really the easiest way to self-host.

Copy a file, usually provided by the developers of the app you want to run, change some values if instructed by the # comments, run docker compose up and it “just works”.

And I say that as someone who has done everything from distro-provided packages to compiling from source, Nix, podman systemd, and currently running a full-blown multi-node distributed storage Kubernetes cluster at home.

Just use docker compose.

fish, the main modern alternative to zsh + oh-my-zsh, is mostly GPLv2, and you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU GPL as published by the Free Software Foundation.

In an ideal world.

But in our world, newbies are being recommended:

• Distros based on ArchLinux, that ship breaking changes and expect users to read .pacnew config files and update their own config accordingly (CachyOS)
• A bunch of shell scripts and Hyprland config masquerading as a distro, made by a white supremacist and used to promote their brand (Omarchy 🤮)
• NixOS. I don’t even known where to begin with this one.

To be 100% clear, I use and like CachyOS and Nix (home manager). CachyOS and NixOS are great projects with good technical performance toward their respective goals (good defaults and performance on Arch, and declarative configuration, respectively), but they are not beginner friendly.

PascalCase
camelCase
snake_case
kebab-case
sPOngEbOBcasE

Old PCs are plenty powerful and compatible with everything, but if energy consumption is a major concern, an old phone can work too.

You are 100% right that Android is a very weird Linux and Termux is limited.

PostmarketOS is a project that enables installation of a full upstream Linux onto old phones. Then you can run whatever (ARM-supporting) distro you like on it, without weird kernel limitations.

Thanks for the meme! This is why I always use BIOS fan control. I already did way before I started using Linux on the desktop.

Those Corsair/Gigabyte/ASUS/etc programs are heavy, probably full of security holes, can come at the cost of gaming performance and soft-lock you into a vendor: you’ll have to set up or tune again if you buy a different brand.

BIOS fan control all the way!

You’re not advertising 196.x.x.x routes to your tailnet?

Cause systemd is pretty amazing 😎

<Jumps behind cover>

And Alpine, the one @Sxan started with.

Alpine has apk, and is (or it should be) the most used base for container images. It is very small, smaller than Debian, so containers built on it are secure and performant.

If you’ve never worked with Docker/Podman/OCI containers, you’ve been missing a lot of good stuff, and you may have heard of Alpine via the amazing “I use Linux as my operating system” copypasta:

“I use Linux as my operating system,” I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. “Actually”, he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!’ I don’t miss a beat and reply with a smirk, “I use Alpine, a distro that doesn’t include the GNU Coreutils, or any other GNU code. It’s Linux, but it’s not GNU+Linux.” The smile quickly drops from the man’s face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams “I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT’S STILL GNU!” Coolly, I reply “If windows were compiled with GCC, would that make it GNU?” I interrupt his response with “-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even if you were correct, you won’t be for long.” With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man’s life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I’ve womansplained him to death.

Good question!

In the Home Operations Discord there’s some very smart people who solved this problem inside kubernetes by checking if their NAS is online (through a Prometheus exporter named node exporter) and then scaling down their workloads that use it, automatically, using KEDA (an autoscaler for kubernetes)

Depending on how your processes are orchestrated, you might be able to do something similar?

Source: https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops/pull/9334/files

/etc/systemd/system/mnt-nfs.mount

[Unit]
Description=Mount NFS Share

[Mount]
What=server:exported_path
Where=/mnt/nfs_share
Type=nfs
Options=_netdev,auto,rw

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

If selfhosting the family chat is not a goal in itself and it’s about privacy or being independent from big tech, just take the loss and go to Signal. Much smoother experience than any self-hosted messenger can provide for now.

The problem with non-PLP drives is that Rook-Ceph will insist that its writes get done in a way that is safe wrt power loss.

For regular consumer drives, that means it has to wait for the cache to be flushed, which takes aaaages (milliseconds!!) and that can cause all kinds of issues. PLP drives have a cache that is safe in the event of power loss, and thus Rook-Ceph is happy to write to cache and consider the operation done.

Again, 1Gb network is not a big deal, not using PLP drives could cause issues.

If you don’t need volsync and don’t need ReadWriteMany, just use Longhorn with its builtin backup system and call it a day.

I tried Longhorn, and ended up concluding that it would not work reliably with Volsync. Volsync (for automatic volume restore on cluster rebuild) is a must for me.

I plan on installing Rook-Ceph. I’m also on 1Gb/s network, so it won’t be fast, but many fellow K8s home opsers are confident it will work.

Rook-ceph does need SSDs with Power Loss Protection (PLP), or it will get extremelly slow (latency). Bandwidth is not as much of an issue. Find some used Samsung PM or SM models, they aren’t expensive.

Longhorn isn’t fussy about consumer SSDs and has its own built-in backup system. It’s not good at ReadWriteMany volumes, but it sounds like you won’t need ReadWriteMany. I suggest you don’t bother with Rook-Ceph yet, as it’s very complex.

Also, join the Home Operations community if you have a Discord account, it’s full of k8s homelabbers.

I’ll add DCS World modders, thank you to the heroes who brave Lua and the DCS API to bring us obscure planes and helicopters!

Nah

EDIT: After reading, I stand corrected. Lua is better than Python and JS for many usecases, mainly due to size and portability.

Their versioning is weird though.