Presenting at BLUG

Hi all,

I finally found my way here into the BLUG discuss server!

As far as content goes, I am preparing to produce a 100DaysOfHomelab YouTube series this winter. The concept starts with a budget friendly used hardware base. In my example cluster we will go through hardware selection and assembly to prepare for a 3 node cluster made from second hand optiplexes in my case. From there we will install fedora with the correct disk and partition layout. Then boot the 3 systems and check prerequisites for conformity and consistency.

After the hardware is out of the way, we’ll dive straight into a copy/paste path to success, deploying kubernetes to these boxes with kubespray. This process takes about 20 minutes of mostly watching Ansible do it’s thing. That time will be good for Q&A and all sorts of strategy, potential, and architectural discussion.

Once kubernetes is ready to go, we’ll layer on our gitops tooling, storage operator, and Kubevirt as our base hypervisor layer with just a few commands.

It may sound like a lot of complexity, I promise it is completely doable and barrier to entry is minimal even for those with no kubernetes experience and just a single node to start with. The best part is that this gives users a common and predictably consistent foundation from which to layer on entirely new labs, services, and capabilities. I have dozens of how-to’s planned on top of this foundation using resources like VyOS, linuxserver.io and such to round out a highly featured and low maintenance home lab cloud making presentation content engaging and topics endless for the foreseeable future.

Regarding presence and attendance. For starters, I suspect improving our messaging and accessibility is going to be necessary before considering attendance numbers. I would love to jump in and help update the website and such of it’s a matter of time and man power. Perhaps we use a blug evening to live edit and publish updated details if no other time is available? I’m just spitballing here so if this is already in the works I’ll stop reinventing the wheel. I know that I’ve attempted to join the online meeting a few months in a row without my Google meet join request being approved.

Apologies for the long post, but I am hoping to spin up into being a regular presenter on rotation in the local blug community and it would be my privilege to get feedback from attendees and session recording audiences to carry back into action items that improve this series.

Whatch’y’all think about that? Let me know how to jump in.

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