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Homelab

Starting the homelab

I found an old mini PC (ASUS Mini PC PN30), left in a drawer from when I thought I needed it to run a Plex media server. With a sudden (unexpected) burst of motivation I decided to run a local kubernetes cluster on it. (In hindsight, I think I might also have been inspired to try self-hosting an RSS reader by this post. I just got distracted, by deciding to self-host using kubernetes).

Making a plan

I asked ChatGPT and Claude for help on how to set up a simple kubernetes setup at home. After some back-and-forth I landed on installing Debian with no graphical desktop environment, and then installing k3s. The choice of k3s was mainly made to limit the resource requirements. The Mini PC is not exactly beefy, with an underpowered CPU and only 4GB RAM (While trying to confirm this number, I found the listing for this on Amazon and it claims that I can upgrade to 8GB RAM. I might do that at some point).

Install Debian

I downloaded an ISO of Debian 12 and made a bootable usb. I connected the Mini PC to a monitor, keyboard and mouse and booted the Debian installer from the usb stick. I selected graphical installer and followed the guidance. I did not create a root user, instead letting my own user get sudo privileges. I did not install a desktop environment. I gave it the hostname tyr. I made sure to select SSH, to allow access after I unplug the peripherals.

Install tools

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install -y vim git curl wget htop

I tried accessing the mini PC over shh from my desktop.

ssh kasper@tyr.local

This did not work, but using the local IP directly works fine.

I really want to use the hostname.local thing, I learned that it is called mDNS, and I need a mDNS service. I installed Avahi, both on my desktop and on the Mini PC

sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon

Install k3s

Now, to install k3s. Following docs at https://k3s.io/.

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -

After a minute, the kubernetes cluster is running and I can query it from tyr

$ sudo k3s kubectl get node 
NAME   STATUS   ROLES                  AGE   VERSION
tyr    Ready    control-plane,master   15h   v1.31.4+k3s1

Next, I want to access it from my desktop. Following the k3s guide I copy /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml from tyr to ~/.kube/config my desktop with scp, and edit the server field to point to IP of tyr. I tried a lot get tyr.local to resolve instead of the IP, but as far as I can tell, kubectl is not using the mDNS stuff from above. Here is the last chat message (in a long back-and-forth) from o1 on why .local does not work.

A statically compiled binary often does not use the system's usual NSS (Name Service Switch) mechanisms—like /etc/nsswitch.conf and libnss-mdns—for hostname resolution. Instead, it typically performs "pure DNS" lookups.

That explains why:

  • ping tyr.local succeeds, because it honors nsswitch.conf and uses Avahi/mDNS.
  • kubectl fails on tyr.local, because it bypasses your local mDNS setup and tries querying a DNS server that doesn't know about .local names.'

ChatGPT suggest some ways to fix it, but the simplest seemed to be to just plug in the IP.

I made sure to go to my router and reserve the local IP address of tyr, so it does not change after a reboot or something.

And finally, I can run the following from my desktop

$ kubectl get node 
NAME   STATUS   ROLES                  AGE   VERSION
tyr    Ready    control-plane,master   44h   v1.31.4+k3s1