I wanted to give my readers a bit of an update on what's been going on in my homelab over the last 24 months.This article is meant to be a short and sweet list of recent enhancements.
All in Technology
Teleport Access Plane
One of the most innovative products I have encountered in a long time is the Teleport Access Plane, or *Teleport* as it is more commonly known. Teleport is a very powerful OSS and commercial product that provides a functional reverse proxy for SSH, RDP, K8s, databases, and web applications in a single product/service, where administrators can seamlessly grant access to their enterprise infrastructure, while simultaneously enabling privileged access management, MFA/2FA, and zero-trust environments. It is by far the coolest connectivity product/service that I have experienced in a long time and it should definitely be in your IT toolbox and homelab.
Raspberry Pi Power Savings and LED Configuration
One of the latest enhancements to my network-based booting Raspberry Pi cluster involved disabling some of the extra hardware and LED lights to save a bit of power, as well as enhance visual indications during restarts, crashes, etc. I've shared snippets of my /boot/config.txt file and have annotated my reasoning for the settings changes.
Raspberry Pi Preparation Scripts
The Raspberry Pi Boot Guide remains one of our blog's most popular articles. This past January, I created a series of shell scripts to ease implementing network based-booting configuration, as well as automating other common administrative tasks, for Raspberry Pi users. I have setup a public GitLab project called rpi-prep to ease distribution and will be discussing how to make use of these scripts in this article.
Synology Hyper Backup to rsync-compatible Server
You want to backup your Synology NAS (or portions of it) via Hyper Backup to an external rsync-compatible server via SSH.
Everything works great, and as expected, when you do not use the "Transfer Encryption" option to connect to your external server running rsyncd, but Hyper Backup throws very generic and unhelpful errors when you enable "Transfer Encryption" and attempt to use SSH.
K3s Homelab on Raspberry Pi 4B
I will breakdown the steps of creating a homelab of your very own without breaking your budget. This guide can be customized to meet your own unique and individual needs. You can horizontally and vertically scale to add more performance, or adjust the role of different components to increase, decrease, or eliminated high-availability depending on your own individual needs. At the same time, all of the components of this environment, with a small bit of effort can be repurposed to other projects, given shifts in your interests, hobbies, and needs.
Kernel Panics with Network Boot on Raspberry Pi 3B+ with latest raspberrypi-bootloader package
For those of you using my Raspberry PI Network Boot Guide, please be aware of an issue with the current raspberrypi-bootloader package (Version: 1:1.20210727-1). Here are the offending package details, though the bug may exist in one of this package’s dependencies.
Raspberry Pi Network Boot Guide
In my spare cycles over the last couple of months, I've spent a significant amount of time refining my process for network booting Raspberry Pis on a Synology NAS. It took reading many other existing blogs, as well as the official Raspberry Pi network boot guide. In the end, I've figured out the nuances of booting a Pi 3B, Pi 3B+, and 4B on both NFS and iSCSI.
Raspberry PI iSCSI Issues
After lots of cool changes on the home network, I wanted to post about something that had stumped me recently with my RPi4 running Raspberry PI OS (Debian Buster). It would seem that configuring my primary Synology for LACP-based link aggregation had an unusual side-effect on my RPi4.
Returning to Linux on the Desktop
Since 1997, I have had an off and on relationship with Linux as a desktop operating system. I've thoroughly enjoyed it as a server operating system, but have never had the everything "just works" experience on desktops. Invariably, there is always something major flaw that becomes too annoying or troublesome that leads me back to Windows…
An old hobby from the '90s lives again....
I would like to catch everyone up on what I’ve been working on with my spare cycles for most of the pandemic.
Back in the pre-Internet era of the early 1990s, there were Bulletin Board Systems or BBS systems. These were expensive personal computer systems that were accessible to the outside world via dedicated landlines and analog dial-up modems.
Newsletter Subscription Issue
Recently, I found that a number of folks had requested a subscription to our newsletter over the past several days, weeks, and months, but our blog’s hosting service (Squarespace) and newsletter subscription service (Mailchimp) were having issues. I believe everyone who successfully subscribed has received copies of recently published articles, while others of you that thought your email subscription was successfully processed may have missed quite a few posts.
Deploying vSphere Integrated Containers
So over the course of the last several months at work, I've been using spare cycles to escape the shackles of management (ie: paperwork, meetings, etc) to keep my technical aptitude sharp by working on deploying the ecosystem required to support vSphere Integrated Containers at the University.
Recycling Technology
Recently, my 2012-era ThinkPad X230 has been showing its age. Over the last 6 years, I've performed numerous performance upgrades and the laptop has been more than enough computer for daily tasks, retro games, multimedia editing, and programming, but for the last 6 months, I've noticed a large crack in the underside of the case that kept getting worse.
Update - Hello Mint SIM!
True to my word, this is the follow-up article to my original Hello Mint SIM! post from September.
After a month of no major issues and even more drama with Teri's T-Mobile account, I switched Teri to Mint Sim in October. We've both been using Mint SIM without any major issues. Calls, Texts, Internet, Android Auto, and Tethering all worked great with Mint SIM.