SRE: Noun;

In part two of this homelab kubernetes setup series, we’re going to install & configure cert-manager to use LetsEncrypt with Route 53 so we can use SSL to connect to our services. The tutorials I’ve seen for using cert-manager with a DNS challenge all use CloudFlare. I have my lab domain on Route 53 so this post will cover that instead. Talos Homelab Setup Series 01 - Setting up Talos with a Cilium CNI on proxmox 02 - Add SSL to Kubernetes using Cilium, cert-manager and LetsEncrypt with domains hosted on Amazon Route 53 Pre-requisites A domain hosted on Amazon Route 53 that you have administrative rights on. A working kubernetes cluster with Cilium installed and configured to be a Gateway. I’m using Talos for mine, but regular kubernetes or k3s clusters will work too. If you need to set up a new cluster, or configure an existing one to use Cilum, read part one of this series. cilium, kubectl & helm - if you don’t want to brew install them, install instructions are at cilium.io, helm.sh and kubectl. Software Versions Here are the versions of the software I used while writing this post. Later versions should work, but this is what these instructions were tested with. ...

I’ve been meaning to set up a talos cluster in my homelab for a while and set one up over the holiday break. Here’s how I did it. ...

After 19 years of hosting email for my domains on Google Workspace (I was an early internal tester when it was still Google Apps) I finally moved my domains to proton.me last month when they had a Cyber Monday sale. There were a lot of reasons that boiled down to: I no longer trust Google to not use my data to train Gemini. I pay less for 500GB worth of storage for proton services than I did for 30GB on Google. And proton includes a VPN as part of my package’s services. Proton is a non-profit, so I don’t have to worry about them deciding to sell my data to prop up the stock price in a down quarter. If you have a proton email account but you haven’t already started importing email into proton, don’t kick that off until you read this - it’s what I wish I had known when I was setting up my account. If you don’t have one but are considering one, here’s a referral link that will get you two weeks for free and $20 off of your first bill. Disclaimer - I get $20 in credit too. ...

I’ve been experimenting with running Talos in my home lab. I really like the idea of an immutable OS layer under Kubernetes and wanted to stand up a cluster to run some of my services that are currently run in docker-compose. I decided to use my Synology to store k8s volumes, here’s how I set that up ...

So here’s a fun macOS weirdness I ran into this weekend where I couldn’t connect to a port on another machine from a shell session inside of iTerm, even though I was able to ssh to other hosts. ...

Here’s the current (as of 2025-09-30) version of my shrimp food recipe. ...

Building a Debian 13 (Trixie) LXC Template for Proxmox Debian 13 (trixie) was released, but (at least as of 2025-08-12) there isn’t a LXC template available for it on proxmox. I wanted a Debian 13 LXC container, so I made a template of my own. Install tooling We’re going to use Debian Appliance Builder to create a Debian 13 LXC template. First, install the tooling: apt update apt install -y dab wget Download Debian 13 configuration mkdir dab cd dab # Get the debian 13 dab configuration wget -O dab.conf "https://git.proxmox.com/?p=dab-pve-appliances.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian-13-trixie-std-64/dab.conf;hb=HEAD" # Get a Makefile to make builds easier wget -O Makefile "https://git.proxmox.com/?p=dab-pve-appliances.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian-13-trixie-std-64/Makefile;hb=HEAD" Build the template Now we can build a template. ...

Nodered, Home Assistant and Tailscale I’m moving my Home Assistant from a docker container to a proxmox VM running HAOS, and as part of that I’m moving Node-RED to its own container so I can move it to other proxmox hosts independently of HAOS. I’m setting up a new Node-RED instance as part of moving Home Assistant out of docker and onto an HAOS VM. My requirements were: Run Node-RED in a separate VM so I can move it to other proxmox hosts if there is resource contention or I need to fail over Proper SSL certificate Easy access via my tailnet Pre-requisites To follow these instructions, you will need: ...

Advice for New Neocaridina Keepers Here’s my advice for someone starting out with neocaridina shrimp. I don’t pretend to be an expert, but my colonies are thriving so I’m doing something right. ...

It seems like everyone has their own recipe for home made food to feed their shrimp. Here’s mine. ...