Where better to start than how my lab is working. My home lab is not one that has really been planned, rather I acquire/buy things as the opportunity arises. It really has 2 things: NAS Kubernetes Info Being in France, I am pretty much obliged to run my ISP’s own router. There are people who have managed to get it working, but I simply cannot be bothered. I do want plenty of control though, so I still run OPNsense on a NUC.

The other day my wife mentioned that I had not been blogging for a while. I looked and it turns out the last post was 4 years ago! I am not really sure what happened, but for whatever reason blogging went on the back burner, Anyway, I am back on it now and have plenty of things to write about. I am still in tech, although things have changed. I have moved on from Claranet and am now at Ubisoft.

I’ve recently decided to change my bike frame as I developed a tendonitis due to my beloved Felt F95 actually being too big. As we are also looking to buy a house, my budget was quite limited. This put a nice shiney Cannondale SystemSix well out of my reach, so I decided to give a Chinese frame a try. This is not as shocking as it sounds because of the realities of the bike market.

I’ve got myself a new toy - a mechanical keyboard. More specifically it is a 69-key Magicforce Smart, with Gateron MX Brown switches. I choose for a few reasons: I have colleague with one, so I know it is good. It was the a good price - I paid about €70 It was one of the few QWERTY UK layout keyboards I found on Amazon France. I’ve fancied a mechanical keyboard for a while, but could never really justify it.

I had a pretty knotty problem in my homelab. I am running a Kubernetes cluster in the with 3 masters and an embeded Etcd cluster. That means that the Etcd cluster runs on the same nodes as the K8s API and scheduler pods. Like them, it is running as Pods controlled directly by Kubelet (magic! except it isn’t). The data on one of those members (node3) got corrupted, so naturally it would no longer join the cluster.

A simple fix for something quite annoying. I set up HPA on some deployments and it did not work. HPA uses the metrics-server to decide when to scale a deployment, but the logs for the metrics-server pod were saying: unable to fully collect metrics: unable to fully scrape metrics from source kubelet_summary:kube: unable to fetch metrics from Kubelet kube (kube): Get https://kube:10250/stats/summary/: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority I have seen this on Kubernetes 1.

Surprisingly for someone that is a professional geek, I actually do not really like having stats in front of me when I ride my bike. As such for years I have been happilly using a basic wireless computer from Decathlon. It was small, simple, cheap and I only changed the battery once in a blue moon. It told me how fast I was going, and the time. That is all I need and I was happy.

Exported Resources are great, but also suck. If you are not careful how you tag them, you can easily end up in a situation where you have duplicate resources on a node. Of course this will mean that your catalogue will fail to compile. Normally, old exported resources are cleaned up the next time the agent runs, but can be prone to failure for various reasons: the node no longer exists the moon is no longer on the right phase Puppet just doesn’t feel like it This means you get a big red error such as:

You cannot do this directly for reasons that I have not tried to understand, but I suspect “it is hard” may have something to do with it. The process is: Mark your cached LV as uncached Extended your LV Recreate your cache Simple, except there are some gotchas. The process of uncaching your LV will delete your cache volumes, so you may need to find out how you previously created them.

For the last few months I have been rolling on a set of Vision Team 30 Comp wheels. These are an entry level set of wheels that are aimed at commuting and training. They have a slightly deeper profile than most other wheels in this price range (below €200) which, along with the bladed spokes make them more aero than your average budget wheel (on paper at least). Also, at least in black, they look great.