Home Lab

The Problem

In my previous post series, I described how I installed my Kubernetes Home Lab using Calico and MetalLB. This worked great up until I started installing smart home software that expected to be able to do local network discovery. For example, Home Assistant and my Sonos control software both attempted to do subnet local discovery using mDNS or broadcast packets. This did not work because the pods were running on a 192.168.4.0/24 subnet, but all of my physical devices were on 192.168.2.0/24.

Next up in the series, we’re going to manually configure all of the network settings to get our flat network home lab. Our flat network should not use any packet encapsulation with all pods and services fully routable to and from the existing network.

Detailed in the previous post, I want a so-called flat network because packet encapsulation tunnels IP packets inside of other IP packets and creates a separate IP network that runs on-top of my existing network.) I wanted all nodes, pods, and services to be fully routable on my home network. Additionally, I had several Sonos speakers and other smart-home devices that I wanted to be control from my k8s cluster which required pods that ran on the same subnet as my other software.

I recently setup a Kubernetes cluster home lab and wanted to do it the hard-way and share it with you. I setup a home lab so I could run my smart home software and learn more about different Kubernetes networking technologies.

This blog post is broken up into several sections. Feel free to skip directly to the section that applies to you.

When I started I had a few things already: