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How to Avoid Network Lockout on Raspberry Pi Kubernetes Clusters Building a Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pis is a rite of passage for homelab enthusiasts. But if you’ve ever watched your Pi cluster go completely dark — no SSH, no kube-API, nothing — hours after a “successful” setup, you’ve hit the network lockout problem. It’s not one bug; it’s six, and they all look the same: unreachable…

When my vCenter and ESXi licenses expired, I needed free alternatives. Here’s what I found and how to set it up. vCenter / ESXi Alternatives 1. Proxmox VE (Recommended) Replaces both ESXi + vCenter in a single install. VMware FeatureProxmox EquivalentESXiProxmox VE (KVM+QEMU)vCenterBuilt-in web UIvMotionLive migrationVMFSLVM / LVM-thin / ZFSDistributed SwitchLinux bridges Best for: Homelabs,…

Objective The goal of this article is to go over the setup of uisp on Raspberry Pi 4, that is running ubuntu 25.10 server. The process is simple, but needs some minor tweaks. So let’s begin! Setting up sudo access With 25.10, you will need to change the way you authenticate using sudo in 25.10 sudo update-alternatives –set sudo /usr/bin/sudo.ws Next ensure your time is in sync. If you…

Using podman desktop instead of docker I’ve used Docker in the past, and offlate I found it super annoying for the following reasons: Pricing Complexity with experimental features to use insecure registries Battery hogger So I moved to using podman. Installation on mac There are 2 options to install podman on the mac. One is to use the installer and 2 is using brew. brew install…

Installation of the OS Flash the NVME m2 SSD using Raspberry Pi Imager, and install Ubuntu 25.10 OS on it. Ensure you specify the hostname, username, password, etc to reduce the steps post flashing the drive. Startup your Raspberry Pi, and configure the network and assign a static ip sudo vi /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml network: version: 2 ethernets: eth0: dhcp4: false addresses: -…

nginx configuration for harbor Create the DNS records in your public DNS Generate the certificates for your external harbor endpoint. I use letsencrypt. Setup harbor on your virtual machine. Ensure you assign a decent amount of storage to this vm. Ensure you set this up to listen on HTTP, not HTTPS Use the following nginx config to do the following Terminate SSL Proxy to the internal harbor…

Switch sudo into manual mode sudo update-alternatives --set sudo /usr/bin/sudo.ws Fix the system time on the ubuntu OS sudo apt-mark auto chrony && sudo apt install -y systemd-timesyncd sudo apt install -y ntpsec-ntpdate sudo ntpdate -u 172.16.0.22 sudo systemctl enable systemd-timesyncd sudo systemctl start systemd-timesyncd sudo systemctl status systemd-timesyncd

The year 2025 isn’t done yet, but there’s a lot for me to look back and learn from. 2024 and 2025 were brutal for a subset of the IT industry. A lot of talented folks were axed due to various reasons, but lets stick with the term Optimization (buzz word). I was one of those, and it was a rough start to 2025. I lost the job due to an acquisition, had personal family problems, hospital visits,…

Observability into k8s platform Kubernetes has been out there for a while, and companies use it heavily to deploy and release their applications faster to market. The platform offers scalability, recovery of pods, etc. But one area that has been of constant struggle, i.e. platform observability. When a worker node goes down, and say there aren’t any more nodes available, then the applications…

I’ve seen trends in the industry, starting since early 2000’s to current year. Instead of poking in the past, lets look at the past 2 trends. The hype around cloud native applications, which was circled around microservices architecture, that helps innovate and delivery features quickly. Companies spent a lot of their time to decompose their monoliths into microservices based on bounded context.…

This is my first non-technical blog. Its 2025, and this year along with 2024 has been rough for a lot of people around the globe. With companies getting conservative with spends, adding a lot of automation, leading with AI – has disrupted the job industry, making humans less relevant. Companies getting acquired and parent company fires employees as they continue to “optimize” their…