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.
Is this heaven? No, it's Iowa...
In Summer of 2023 after a couple of years of discussing it, Teri and I felt it was time to do what still baffles some folks: We gave up life in Southern Nevada to relocate the family to Central Iowa.
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.
Fresh look for the site and reflection
It has been several months since my last post and so much has happened with life, adventures, and my homelab that my head is spinning. I'm excited to give an updated and refreshed look to the blog. I hope you like it. I've installed a new template and layout.
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.
Blog User Experience
Happy 2022! This year is shaping up to be an incredibly busy year for us, and Teri and I still have so much to discuss and share from 2021 in upcoming articles!
I wanted to announce our decision to remove Google Ads from this blog site. While our readership has steadily been growing, the volume of traffic that our blog receives is not large enough to benefit from Google Ads.
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.
Floyd Lamb Park
I have been on an extended 4th of July weekend from work to spend some quality time with Teri and Rosslyn. This past Friday, Teri was having some much needed "Mom Time" and I decided to take Rosslyn to a new park to explore.
Reworking the Blog's Media Gallery
Recently, I cleaned out our blog's media gallery. It hasn't been updated in quite some time. I am excited to use some of the recent updates to the Squarespace platform to start posting photos and videos from some of our adventures.
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…