Homelab Chronicles: From abandoned gaming PC to 14 minute k8s cluster provisioningDownsides of Decorative Nerd Arms#<br>I have a photo on my phone. A photo that I loathe with every fibre of my being. It’s a picture of a monitor on my basement floor showing an Ubuntu boot error.<br>I was too tired to type the error into Google. AGAIN. OCR was my (temporary) saviour, for now. I fixed the error, eventually. It didn’t last long. After another power outage, another Ubuntu boot error.<br>At that moment, clenching my teeth, I had the urge to throw this trash out of the window, but a series of revelations hit me:<br>I’m in a basement and the window is at forehead height.<br>Gravity is undefeated.<br>My nerd-arms are purely decorative.<br>Shit…I decided to reinstall Ubuntu, AGAIN.<br>I wanted to build a system to scrape financial data from webpages and APIs. Why? ‘Cause every SWE thinks they are smarter than the market at one point in their career.<br>It started as:<br>1 ATX PC<br>1x Ubuntu Linux<br>1x Postgres DB<br>1x Scraper instance<br>Manual installations<br>It turned into:<br>3 miniPCs<br>3x Proxmox instances running Talos K8s Linux<br>14 minute provisioning of a 3 node k8s cluster<br>and…98 K8s pods<br>I didn’t start with a grand plan. I started with a bad idea, and a lot of optimism. I over-engineered the shit out of it. Questions you might have:<br>Q: Did I need 3x sharded MongoDB for a dataset that could fit on a USB stick?<br>A: No.<br>Q: Did I do it because I wanted to see what happens when you unplug a node mid-write?<br>A: Yes.<br>Q: Did I ever test this?<br>A: FUCK NO!<br>I am not emotionally prepared for the bottom-clenching terror. The plugs stay IN.<br>The next 2.5 years will be told in sometimes excruciating detail, other times in no detail at all ‘cause ya boi didn’t write notes. I’m pulling the details out from the photos and texts I sent to friends (Timmy did indeed Cook!)<br>The AI not in this Room#<br>I use AI. I blog about AI(Fork-Bomb, LLM Gaslighting). Then…why didn’t I use AI here?<br>This all started/occurred before AI became useful. There is a lot of head banging where the obvious answer now is…”wHy DiDn’T yOu AkS aI?” ‘Cause it was stupid stupider.<br>…and I don’t want AI to do this for me ‘cause that takes the learning and the fun out of it. This is my hobby. Just like this blog. I enjoy doing this shit. I don’t need to optimize this aspect of my life.<br>Also, it takes the fun out of forcing my friends to read my shitty jokes and give me compliments on said shitty jokes.<br>Blame uAlberta for the PC (uPC)#<br>It started with a PC I took home during the 2020 plague. I was working as a research assistant in the Educational Psychology department at uAlberta, developing a “game”.<br>The data from this “game” would be used to produce a PhD thesis. I had finished the contract and was working as a full-time SWEEE a few years later.<br>The uPC sat there, in a corner in the basement, covered in dust…the university hadn’t asked for it back since I had finished the project. “it’s just collecting dust,” I told myself. “i should use it for something useful.”<br>This beast (anything but ) initially had something like:<br>CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6600<br>GPU: Nvidia…something…GTX 1080? 1660? IDFK<br>Memory: 16 GB of Glacial DDR3 RAM<br>Storage:1x256GB Samsung SATA SSD<br>1x2TB Seagate Barracuda HDD feat. slower reads than watching paint dry
Eventually, the university asked for it back; I’m pulling all that out of my brain, maybe some of it out of my butt…and iMessage.<br>I decided to wipe all the drives and install Ubuntu on the uPC. Ubuntu…and installed everything manually. Without backups, scripts or any automation.<br>✌️#<br>On the next episode of…this idiot did what?!?!?!…<br>The ShitMac arrives with a Broadcom BCM4360 WiFi card whose drivers made me want to stab whoever picked this chipset with an extremely dull spoon…<br>…in chapter 2.<br>to find out why the dull spoon-stabbing crossed my mind...drop your email...
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Disclaimer: This is 2.5 years of pain, rage and skill issues being remembered through texts, Google search history and browser history. There will be inaccuracies.