Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service
I have a slight problem where I have too many computers in my office. These extra computers are my homelab, or a bunch of slack compute that I can use to run various workloads at home. I use my homelab to have a place to "just run things" like Plex and the whole host of other services that I either run or have written for my husband and I.
I want to have my own platform so that I can run things that I used to run in the cloud. If I can "just run things locally", I can put my slack compute space to work for good. This can help me justify the power bill of these nodes to my landlord!
Really, I just wanna be able to use this to mess around, try new things, and turn the fruit of those experiments into blogposts like this one. Until very recently, everything in my homelab ran NixOS. A friend of mine has been goading me into trying Kubernetes again, and in a moment of weakness, I decided to see how bad the situation was to get Kubernetes running on my own hardware at home.
When the homelab was built, the Core i5-10600 was a "last generation" processor. It also met a perfect balance between compute oomph, onboard iGPU support, power usage, and not requiring a massive cooler to keep it running happily. We could probably get some more use out of newer processors, but that will probably have to wait for one or more of our towers/their parts to get cycled out in regular upgrades. That probably won't happen for a year or two, but it'll be nice to get a Ryzen 9 5950x or two into the cluster eventually.
