A letter to myself on why I do this
This is a bit of a different blog post and also feels weird to write. Almost like I am trying to justify this hobby to myself, because it is a hobby, right? Something you gain enjoyment from? My running theory is that I am actually a masochist because who would continue to persist with something after it causing so much pain? This does allude to some future blog posts that I hope to get out soon, which continue my previous writing spells theme of “things break, I lose data, I get sad, but its fine”.
Using methods from Slow Productivity to better plan work
Now that I feel I can take my gaze away from my infrastructure, what do I want to work on now? I am going to do a follow up post, perhaps a standalone piece on my website where I really deep dive into the why’s of my self hosting journey. I touch on it at points throughout my posts and I feel like having a condensed piece that goes over everything, will be good for me to just get it all written down and to have a resource to refer to when I get asked the question “well why are you a lunatic?” haha
Trying my best to tell myself it is indeed solved
The dust has very much settled at this point. I’ve sort of sat and stared for a while as I can’t quite believe the stability I’ve experienced after so much instability. It’s been about two or so weeks since I took action once again on the hardware front, and it’s been all quiet on this front. I mentioned previously acquiring new hardware, but as it turns out that was not the issue. But it did lead to discovery of what seemed to be either the root cause or at least partner in crime of my woe.
Probably not, but I’m just letting the dust settle
While I took a break from my current endeavours for a while, I jumped back in quite quickly. I’ve since taken a more deliberate break. This weekend gone, besides some routine patching I did literally nothing self hosting related and it was honestly glorious. But it’s time to go over what steps I took after the realisation of having to lose an entire Kubernetes cluster, yet again, and why I feel / hope that the end is approaching in this story arc.
“a victory that is not worth winning because the winner has lost so much in winning it”
It must be said that emotions on a self hosting follow a sine wave pattern of “its so over” for dips, to “we are so back” for highs. We’ve had several problems that I was able to solve, (the high) and then feeling like everything was done, encountered new ones that have derailed things entirely (the low). The title of this blog post is I think the perfect way of describing how my weekend went with trying to fix my local cluster once and for all.
Things just mostly started working again?
As I wrote about yesterday, the plan was to get home and start troubleshooting the issue with the one NUC. Absolutely horrible drive home in terms of weather, though certainly better than ice and cold. I was expecting to encounter some kind of issue that would be new to me and therefore would need an evening of research. At a bare minimum I was expecting some form of operating system corruption perhaps, hopefully not hardware failures beyond say storage and memory. Once I got home it was a case of unplugging things so that I could plug them into the NUC, a further reminder of needing to invest in a KVM.
Day Two Firefighting, Almost Literally
Christmas came and went and I spent a good chunk of mine working on my self hosting hobby. Of course I took time to recharge and enjoy the holiday period. Honestly I think it was one of my most relaxing Christmas’ ever, certainly having the ability to drive off to wherever I wanted to probably helped, even though I didn’t seize that particular opportunity. I’m never one to just sit down and be idle, even with a TV on I’d find myself wanting to be doing something else. From my last blog post I had laid the foundations for my local Kubernetes cluster and I was eager to see to some building on top of said foundations.
Strap in because we going for it
Earlier in the summer I decided I needed to repave my local infrastructure to move away from Docker Compose and towards Kubernetes, as part of revitalising my self hosting hobby. I worked on creating a remote Kubernetes cluster, initially trying to use my local compute for Nodes on this cluster, which failed. I then elected to simply pay for a managed Kubernetes cluster for a few months to at least experiment with how I would operate such a cluster.
One of the simplest ways to onboard container workloads to Tailscale
Embracing Tailscale in my infrastructure has solved myriad problems for me. Having a way of remotely accessing my infrastructure and services is obviously the main one. I think the technical challenge of learning how to securely expose such things from home would be interesting. But for me carries too much weight of something going very wrong if done poorly. Those connections also all being secured over WireGuard under the hood is also a source of comfort considering how tried and tested that solution is. There is some dealbreakers naturally. Choosing a some what proprietary product (I believe the control plane is the bit here that is) as the backbone of ones networking layer for accessing software that’s freely available to download, has a certain irony. I also believe that in the event of total internet loss at home, I wouldn’t be able to access any of the services on devices literal centimetres away from me. For now though I’m happy to tolerate these things. Tailscale is of a quality to me that I would throw my money at them with very little hesitation if I wasn’t on the free tier anymore and I always think making these commitments on foundational services helps to reduce anxiety and the oft overwhelming feeling of viewing the technical based ice cream parlour selection of what tools to use.
