In my Kubernetes, I sometimes try to run a pod on a specific worker node. Maybe one of them has a folder that I need or a specific hardware characteristic. Historically, I’ve used Pod spec.nodeName: srv5 However, when that node becomes unavailable, say because it’s run out of disk space and has DiskPressure on it, then Kubernetes will continually try to spin up thousands of pods on it.
A screenshot of CPU usage growing, then Prometheus falls over and can’t scrap anymore.
In my previous post, I showed how to provision a Kubernetes node in NixOS maintaining compatibility with RKE1 (Rancher Kubernetes Engine v1), but switching to the Kubernetes nixpkg. In this post, I’m going to show how to take an Ubuntu worker and replace it with a NixOS based worker without rebuilding the cluster.
Everybody’s doing it. I guess I need to do an AI, too. In my home, I have a few different tools that use generative AI and LLMs. I talk to my Home Assistant Voice Preview voice assistants which leverage a self-hosted Ollama running llama3.2. I use OpenWebUI, tried Tabby as an experimental coding assistant. I use DeepInfra for larger models that don’t fit on my own GPU.
However, my problem is that each program supports different providers and models. Some support OpenAI style APIs to any provider, some only support Ollama APIs. If I wanted to forward my Home Assistant queries to DeepInfra, it wasn’t easy to do because there wasn’t an integration. If I wanted to change the model that Tabby uses between different models, I had to redeploy the service.
Digital advertising is everywhere nowadays. However, they are actually a giant risk to privacy and now, safety. To be successful, digital advertising depends on showing you highly targeted advertisements, which ultimately incentivizes them to build up profiles about you via your browsing history, search queries, location, demographics, and even behavioral patterns. More data about you means they can find ads that you’re more likely to be influenced by.
RKE1 (Rancher Kubernetes Engine 1) was Rancher’s first way of automatically deploying Kubernetes to a cluster. Think of it like minikube or on-prem EKS or K3s. Three years ago, it was marked as end of life (EoL) with the last release being July 2025. They have no migration guide and their strategy is just rebuild the cluster. I have 3 nodes a bunch of services running in Kubernetes. I don’t want to take everything down and rebuild it all. Let’s rebuild it while the plane is in the air.