I set out this morning to write a post on configuring external ETCD for Kubernetes, with openssl self-signed certs (you know, the kind you use for your home lab). I got sidetracked on openssl and all of its ever-changing/deprecated options. So, this will be a preamble to that original intent.

Other than key sizes and algorithms, only a few command options have changed in openssl v3. I won’t dive into key size and algorithms (too much to cover there). In this post, I will cover the why and how of creating self-signed certificates with openssl, along with up to date commands for v3.  I think the first time I grappled with understanding SSL (now TLS) was 1997. Although SSL has now become TLS, not a lot has changed with the underlying basic dynamics of public key encryption. Continue reading →

A few posts back, I revisited setting up a Kubernetes cluster from scratch with Kubeadm. In this post, I’m going to cover upgrading a Kubeadm deployed cluster.

The Kubernetes version I deployed previously is v1.26.1 and now 1.26.2 is available. So lets go through the process of upgrading to 1.26.2. The first thing you should do (not covered here) is to backup your Kubernetes cluster. In the event you encounter an issue that Kubeadm cannot recover from, the backup is your next recourse. At a minimum, make a backup of the etcd database.

To find the latest release of K8s, we can look at https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/releases. Here we see a 1.27.0 alpha pre-release is posted, and the latest is 1.26.2. (Steps also available in this repo) Continue reading →

How do you get a recording properly leveled (normalized) for YouTube? Glad you asked. In part two of my take-a-break-from-K8s posting, I’ll answer that question. I mentioned a limiter in my previous post. A limiter is somewhat self-described. It places a limit on the maximum audio level. If you hit the limiter threshold, it will squash the audio to keep it under the threshold level. This comes in handy in the worse-case scenario of going above full scale zero and clipping. Think of a limiter as your last resort safe guard for not clipping your audio (I’ve seen professional audio engineers use limiters to raise gain and normalize, this is beyond my current understanding. I know what sounds good to me and using a limiter to exceed zero always sounds bad to me). Continue reading →

Stepping aside from my normal topics to post about a question I was recently asked. The topic was audio equipment and process for YouTube videos. Audio is another science. It presents challenges that catch my interest in much the same way IT does.

Listen closely to the next show you watch. Pay attention to the environment the recorded voices are in. You’ll see that excellent vocal recording is captured and produced in many different settings. Then try to get a decent recording from your desk. There is a lot of science and skill in this detail. Continue reading →

Short post, to hopefully save someone from trashing their R720 home lab server too soon. TL;DR, ESXi 8.0 works on an R720 with a PERC H710 controller. Continue reading →

TL;DR: Steps to install CRI-O and Kubeadm provisioned cluster on Ubuntu 22.04.

Hard for me to believe, it has nearly  been five years since my first (and only) post on Kubeadm. That was circa Kubernetes version 1.09, and I was sort of posting what I had learned about Kubeadm, as I went through it.

I recently came up on my latest expiring home lab vSphere license. This annual event always causes me to reconsider how I use my server and whether handing out more cash is the best option. This year, I’ve decided to let go of the automation niceness, and see how I do without. You may have read some of my past posts where I tried Proxmox/KVM for a bit. I never really got the network and storage performing well enough, but may give it another try at some point. Continue reading →

This post is a published draft. I will be adding to it as I can. 

This post will cover basic troubleshooting of Crossplane. I have other posts that describe the components of Crossplane, so I won’t rehash all of that here. This is certainly not all encompassing. It is simply a list of common issues and how to resolve them.

Additional tips can be found here: link to Crossplane.io troubleshooting tips.

Everything that happens before the Managed Resource is created is controlled by the Crossplane core. If you are experiencing issues with Claims, XRs, or Compositions being created, then troubleshoot at the Crossplane core. Continue reading →

From two recent slack threads, I was reminded I’ve set some things between Argo CD and Crossplane, that I haven’t posted here.

This setting is required whether you use Argo CD or not. But it came up on a question about why the Argo CD custom health check wasn’t working. When creating a ProviderConfig for provider-kubernetes or provider-helm in a Composition, you must add base.readinessChecks[0].type: None (And because wordpress destroys all of my yaml formatting, see example of it here. at lines 291-292):

The other recent issue that came up was how Argo CD complains that a Crossplane ProviderConfig CRD doesn’t exist before the Provider is fully initialized. The way around that is with a simple annotation.

For that annotation, see line #7 of this ProviderConfig:

Hopefully this single post’s title shows up in searches for both issues.

TL;DR: Repo = https://github.com/n8sOrganization/cp-aws-irsa

The previous three posts were overviews of the six types of patches available to Crossplane Compositions. In this post, I’ll walk through a configuration that uses all of them. I’ll also touch on transforms when they come up. While the configuration is for EKS IRSA, explaining IRSA is not the intent of this post. In a nutshell, IRSA enables a K8s Role to attain the privileges of an AWS Role. In the case of this config, we are using IRSA so that the EBS CSI containers have appropriate privileges to provision EBS volumes.

The config consists of four XRs: XCluster, XK8s, XNetwork, and XChart. XCluster exposes a claim that accepts basic input of spec.id, spec.cloud, spec.parameters.nodes.size, and spec.parameters.nodes.count. XCluster selects a Composition that has XK8s and XNetwork nested. XNetwork provisions the VPC and all of the networking required for our EKS cluster. XK8s provisions the EKS cluster, IAM Roles, creates a ProviderConfig for provider-helm, and creates an instance of XChart to deploy the AWS EBS CSI helm chart. The XChart also configures IAM resources for IRSA. Continue reading →

In the previous two posts, I covered FromCompositeFieldPath and ToCompositeFieldPath. In this post, I’ll cover CombineFromComposite and CombineToComposite.

The Combine patches enable us to include multiple string values into a single patch. For this example, I’ll focus on CombineFromComposite, you can infer the CombineToComposite  patch from the previous ToCompositeFieldPath post. Continue reading →