Time flies when you are having fun!
I spent the last year learning, tinkering, testing, getting mad… but I’m still here, ready to do it again and again!
Doing all these things while in a full time job is not easy. Sometimes when you come back from work you just want to rest and chill, and it’s difficult to find the strength to carry on. So, it was challenging, but also fun and rewarding.
Let’s wrap it up!
New setup
I changed the setup after a couple of months, and this is what I have done:
- Bought a new machine and migrated all my Docker containers there
- Get rid of Proxmox and installed ESXi instead
- Set up few VMs for testing and practice with Ansible
- Bought a HP Proliant Microserver N40L and installed OpenMediaVault on it
Now I have a bigger playground, and I feel more in control (mainly because I know I have backups on my NAS).
Recently I destroyed all the VMs in ESXi and set up a 5 nodes Kubernetes cluster using K3s.
The biggest win
Maybe for some people this is not considered a big win, but it is for me.
I coded a simple Telegram Bot in Python and created a container image of it. I then created a deployment for this bot in my K3s cluster. For the final touch, I set up ArgoCD to monitor the repository where the deployment manifest is, so if I want to change something (e.g. put the bot in maintenance mode) I can just edit the manifest and ArgoCD will do the rest for me.
The biggest fail
I guess this is a common mistake…
One of the first thing I have tried with Ansible was trying to configure sshd_config. The idea was simple, just change SSH port, disable root login, and set up AllowUsers.
I know you already guessed where this is going…
So, I set the template out, set the AllowUsers with a user I had on a different machine and run the playbook. Everything went fine without any errors, but I soon realised I messed up the user and locked myself out of that machine. Luckily I had physical access to that machine, so I managed to get in and fix my mistake. This is something that will not happen again.
A piece of advice
I really enjoy administering my home lab, trying to improve things, implement automation when I can… it’s so much fun! As I said earlier, sometimes could be challenging if you are in a full time job. You are constantly thinking how to fix that issue, or how to automate this or that, what technology you need to learn, and so on…
If you are in the same situation and you are struggling to keep it up, keep this in mind: it’s ok to take a break.