From a random Kubernetes control plane crash to a new RAID array

My external cluster runs on 3 different dedicated servers (most from SoYouStart.com.) I have 3 machines since the Kubernetes control plane needs 3 or more to be able to have a quorum and be able to handle any one machine going down. If one machine goes down, then the other two maintain a majority and can agree on the state of the cluster.

I randomly encountered issues where the Kubernetes control plane of Rancher UI would crash and restart. While this cluster didn’t really matter, it still annoyed me and wanted to figure it out.

Featured image of post Over-engineering a home air quality dashboard

Over-engineering a home air quality dashboard

Air—it’s invisible, I can’t see it, but I feel effects of it in so many ways, temperature, humidity, gas composition, but I lacked sensors to measure it. In this post, I walk through some different Air Quality sensors that I found and how I wired them up into a dashboard.

Prerequisite Software

This project depends on a few software components. This post will assume that you have these set up already.

Accurate, Local Home Energy Monitoring: Part 3 – Software Config

This article is part of the Home Energy Monitoring series.

In the previous post in this series, I selected an energy monitoring system that is purely local based (no cloud), integrates into the breaker box, and showed how to connect it to the network and configure the size of each circuit. In this post, I’ll show how to connect the BrulTech GreenEye Energy Monitor to HomeAssistant and create some useful monitoring dashboards.

GreenEye Monitor Firmware

While trying to connect my monitor to Home Assistant, I came across a firmware bug in the GreenEye Monitor and found a forum thread that Brultech had a bug with their packet formats which has been fixed in firmware version 5.39+. To check and find the serial number which will be needed, navigate to http://{monitor ip}:8000/, then click “Enter Setup Mode”.

Split Horizon DNS with external-dns and cert-manager for Kubernetes

There were a few services that I ran that I wanted to be able to access from both inside my home network and outside my home network. If I was inside my home network, I wanted to route directly to the service, but if I was outside I needed to be able to route traffic through a proxy that would then route into my home lab. Additionally, I wanted to support SSL on all my services for security using cert-manager