This homelab setup is my favorite one yet. 

i did not understand anything past nixos but i still watched until the end

We are really interested in a crash course about homelab computing. How is a cluster useful? What is the purpose of a DNS? Load balancer? Namespace? All of those questions are a search away, but a "getting started" video would blow up for sure.

Devops engineer here. Ubuntu server + Ansible is how I roll, both for homelab and at work.

It's funny this video found me. I just purchased 3 of those Mini-Pc's 3 days ago, and now this is sitting in my video feed. I guess the algorithms are on the job.

Budget tip #574: Buy 8GB version of Beelink EQ12 + 32GB RAM stick. You can save some money especially when buying more nodes. Reselling the 16GB stick is not easy (and not worth it). I have 6 EQ12s in a cluster, fantastic little machines to play with!

I did learn nothing from this video - too complex 😅 but it did spark interest for trying kubernetes stuff myself

Nice to see more NixOS around! I am using colmena to keep a config of my nodes, so I don't need to SSH into them to apply changes to my NixOS nodes. Keep it coming!

neat to see some examples of k8s based homelabbing/self hosting!

Great video, just note. You should never writte a secret in a nix things even if you don't use git. Almost everything you put in secret will end up in the nix stores so beware of leaving behind secret there

Great in-depth and detailed explanation for setting up a cluster from scratch, especially nice that in the end you explained why you needed two additional charts to get the final pieces of the puzzle working. Thanks!

Last week in office cleanup I was asking for 2-3 cpus and two guys from leadership gave me their own old cpus. I was thinking about setting a kubernetes cluster. Lo and behold your video comes now I know what to do this weekend.

I still need to learn more about how Kubernetes works, but I really appreciate your approach of setting up part of it, encountering an error, then fixing that error. Moving along in small steps, showing the error and how to fix it, I find really helps me to understand how the pieces fit together, rather than just giving a config file that works for you and leaving it up to me to figure out what I need to change for my environment.

Tried a similar setup about a year ago for some light homelabe stuff I wanted highly available. This would have made the exact thing I was trying, much simpler. I got flash backs multiple times in this video. The iscusi dependancy abd fix, metal lb crds with nginx as the ingress, yea identical and this is cleaner still. Add cert manager and you'll have everything I needed at the time. If you plan on continuing with this project and series I'd be interested to see, meanwhile I'll take a look at you're other videos. Good stuff, nice work.

The rest of the video was good enough to excuse not saying "i-skuzzy". Took me a second to realize that MetalLB was required for DHCP since its layer 2 and would not be routed in or out of the cluster without an outside relay.

This was excellent. Although I would love to have seen the HA feature testdriven; perhaps builidng out the k3s stack and THEN upgrading the RAM & storage iteratively. I would also love to see cert-manager integration, as well as acme/letsencrypt.

this is so awesome and exactly the kind of video i was hoping for from you. i'm here for all the homelab content all day.

Bookmarks for the video would be a *really* nice thing to have. Such an awesome setup! Thank you for sharing it!

I didn't understand everything in this video, but it was good to watch, and certainly something to refer back to when i want to learn more about setting up my own home lab. I subscribed to see more videos about this and what you do with this home lab in the future.

never heard of helmfile until today, thanks.

Great video! As a follow-up, I'd be interested in more specifics on HA and disaster recovery, especially regarding Longhorn.

I manage some Kubernetes clusters in the cloud and I learned a few things. Very interesting video. I bumped into your video 2 days ago because I did some searches on mini-pcs with n100 Intel cpu. I wanted to setup a Proxmox server with a Home Assistant VM as a starter. I also already copied some of your zsh config and moved my prompt from PowerLevel10Kto oh-my-posh (I already used it for powershell with the default config). To test some Kubernetes configurations without deploying to the cloud I use K3D (in WSL on my laptop). Nodes are docker containers. It worked well for my use cases, I managed to validate some istio (service mesh) egress load balancing setup. But yes it is not a permanent home lab setup...

i'm impressed by the clear and concise instructions you give in this video. to be honest, the whole kubernetes with helm with helm charts with helm values with ingresscontroller etc, sounds like a lot of work to setup. it doesn't give me the feeling this setup is stable, but don't really know any details beyond that first look. It would be interesting to hear about the usual breakage scenario's, and how updates look like.

I mostly enjoyed how clean your UI looks.

The DNS automation is huge! Thank you.

This is the first time your channel has been recommended to me, and I subbed before I even watched the video.

😮 ngl the way the tooling is presented reminds me of the Microservices skit

I just got my framework 16 recently. Loving it so far :). ⚙️

Your automation tools and workflow is amazing, really interested if you make like crash courses for the tools you used.

You can use avahi to broadcast hostnames to the network so you can refer to all nodes by their hostname and not have to remember ips.

I understood everything you just did and that’s honestly a fantastic process you laid out but I do NOT feel confident that I could do it myself. You ran into extremely difficult issues that I don’t know how I would have figured out on my own. Great video though.

Thank you so much for this video! This pretty much exactly encapsulates my vision of what i am currently in the process of building! The helmfile and kustomize were two Lego bricks i felt like i was missing in my current attempt. I'm excited to see more!

Can't wait to see your video on Talos Linux

Im so jealous you had the knowledge to be able to execute this project. I would love to make your acquaintance and learn your background.

Great video and you have a talent to very cleary explain complicated concepts in a simple way. As a devops engineer working with this stuff daily I can say your setup is very nice and clean. But honestly I would not spend that much just to run a few containers! $200 worth of used laptops would be good enough for 10 times this workload. But I can also understand the desire to have a perfect setup. Looking forward to videos where you utilise that horsepower, maybe with Frigate and local LLMs?

This is the tutorial I wish i had a couple of years ago trying to figure all this out

I understood maybe 10% of that, but enjoyed every second of it!

Great video, thanks for making! 🙏 Am curious to learn more about nix in upcoming videos

This seems fun, once i move to a bigger place i will definitely try to do something like this

Great video! love how detailed it is

excellent video! I appreciate your CLI-to-video approach and you cover interesting content.

Who all saw yesterdays stream, nice thumbnail!

Wow, I learned a few things and it gives me some ideas to try in my clusters

Highly relevant to my interests! I was dabbling with RKE2 but I'm not really in that mindset yet, so I think I'll go back to K3S. My nodes are running on RK3588 CMs, so I'm not sure if I can use Nix though. Will investigate further.

Great video as always, boss

Excellent! Thank you very much for sharing!

Wow, that's brilliant ! Overcomplexifying things that could be done with bachelor's degree networking knowledge.

Been there, done it. I would NOT use really small PCs, unless they are Enterprise grade (used, cheap) so you never have to worry about dangling cables.

That's some overkill setup for a pihole ;)

Talos user here. If all you are interested in is k8s, Talos is a perfect set and (almost) forget solution (remember to update it!) I also run Talos on production clusters, I can vouch for the ease and stability.

We are rebuilding our Kubernetes clusters at work to use Talos, highly recommend a look! Its the first time servers i deployed on-prem truly felt lile cattle instead of pets. Terraform + Talos config + Helmfiles + Gitlab CI pipelines is life changing lol. I can deploy a full production ready cluster from Gitlab in a matter of minutes

Talos definitely would have been a quicker way of getting to a Kubernetes cluster. My firewall provides DHCP, which sets the hostname for each of my Talos nodes. This means I can use a single config for all nodes, only diverting controlplane and worker nodes. If you take a look at the quick start docs - yes, it is actually this easy. But kudos for going the long way, it builds experience ;)

Thanks for the video! And bonus points for having the same laptop and keyboard as I do 👍

Great video! I would love to see a kube install of jellyfin with hardware acceleration. This is easy on raw-docker, but not so straightforward on kube.

Loved the video after nixos anywhere I am lost but still saw the whole video at least I will sound smart when i will use the terms I learned here in front of my noobs friends. Hope to see many more videos in homelab series. ❤

This is the most alt way Ive seem of setting up high availability. To to it from scratch like this seem overly complicated but fun

This is awesome. I also have own the Beelink EQ12. Really fantastic device. A thing to note is that you'll need at least a 6.6.x kernel to get the wireless interface(s) functioning. I wanted to use Ubuntu Server, but of course I purchased the device just before 24.04 dropped, so that meant more work. Instead I went with Pop! OS ... Definitely not ideal, but the machine is running pretty well. Next up, I would love to replicate what you've done here. We both need the rack-mount tray thing that "Techno Tim" used for his mini pc build. Though, he went with much more powerful Intel NUC machines.

been into homelab for about a year. now wfh is never been the same

i had a *fun time setting up pihole's recursive DNS server via docker on my NAS. in hindsight, recursive dns was a nice to have but not worth it for the extra container instability/troubleshooting during a reboot.

This video is like ASMR to me.

01:08 British accent and American plug. Brain went "huh?" 😀

I just want you to make actual in-depth courses, workshops and alike, to really push this sort of stuff forward. I'd be first on queue.

Great video, and a lot of cool ideas for me to now try over the next month or so. I setup a k3s "cluster" just this morning, the timing for this video could not be any more perfect. All I wanted was a postgres database for one of my side projects, so I just use an old rpi 3b that I had lying around and installed k3s on it just for fun. helmfile looks interesting though, I might give it a shot. I just made 5 different yaml configs to deploy postgres, followed a guide from digital ocean. A beelink eq12 cluster seems a little overkill for my use case, but I might add some more PIs to my cluster and then add kubernetes to my resume.

Man NixOS kicked my ass the first time I confidently decided to install it , had a small issue , no biggie ill just check the wiki ... 2 hours later and 30 tabs open I knew I was in over my head ! i will try again sometime though.

Good video!

Pretty dope! But just some remarks: with Talos you'd have spend much less time setting up your cluster (I totally get why you had done this, but still maintenance is a lot better on Talos), also you should check out the piraeus storage operator, it is muuuuch better than longhorn in terms of draining nodes, speed and maintainability as It's using drbd kernel module under the hood. (Talos has an extension for the kmod btw). Still great setup, I'm pretty jealous. Maybe try out kubevirt and hosting some VMs;) but you'll probably want to use piraeus/drbd for the storage then 😅, Longhorn is just hella slow

This is an amazing video on so many levels.. finally a knowledgeable peer that has a functioning brain and talks about interesting stuff without all the useless stuff (how to open your browser), bad advice (install via `curl | sudo`) and non-sense that ALL the other channels do. Thanks for existing Elliott, you just won a loyal subscriber. Also TIL systemd tmpfiles.. nice tip :) .. and that externa-dns supports pi-hole as a provider! neat! \o/

Going to start calling it Kuberneddies from now on

Exactly what I was looking to do on my homelab (except I'm using debian/terraform/ansible, instead of Nix/helmfile). Two small things missing I think : `ingressClassName: "nginx-internal"` in `pihole.yaml`, and remembering to configure the router to use pihole as the default DNS. Otherwise, thanks for the base config!

MORE HOMELAB PLZ!!

Great video! I know it's a bit off-topic, but I'd love to see a video of you showing how you setup your Hyprland, it looks so nice and clean at 5:00 😊

Nix mentioned 🙏

Nice video! It’s nice to see some alternative choices. You could also check out rancher and harvester. I’m currently building a new homelab with rancher, Traefik (feel the pain), cert-manager, longhorn and metallb.

I just use a basic server with SystemD, worked fine for years now.

You just got a new subscriber 👍

NixOS is sooooooooo goooood!

Great video, would love to see the next episode. I think I prefer Ubuntu server though

Awesome video. I do have a question: Why do you use Kustomize for a file that doesn't need any templating? Just use kubectl apply -f file.yaml instead of using kustomize and adding more complexity.

Isn't the point of high availability to have the nodes different locations (eg: having all nodes in one location is still a single point of failure), from what i see the benefit here is the replication of data into three different nodes, but a local DAS or NAS would have done the trick!

I've been thinking about using nixos on the server side as well for a while. But I felt like it was more suited for clients. But after seeing this, I may should try it on the serverside as well..

Another hardware to consider is the Odroid H3 or H4 mini boards. They can be more affordable depending on where you live (edit: spelling)

Appreciate you documenting your homelab renovation! Any chance you have a public facing repo with some of the IaC shown here? ty!

Awesome video. Can you kindly explain your terminal setup? Especially what terminal based file explorer that was? I know about and use zen but your configuration was 👌

Great video! Interested about your jellyfin setup

Maybe try installing home assistant on this cluster.

Hi, loved the video. I might be wrong, but I believe you have your cluster set up such that you have all three nodes as part of both the control plane and hosting worker pods. Is this correct? If so, are you not concerned about a possible container escape?

Dude, you inspired me to get my Lab inorder :D Got two of those Belkins together with some HP Mini G3s I have One thing thought, Would you consider making a video abt NixOS? I am running MacOS with Nix installed ( dont know if I can do what you suggesting with nixOS anywhere ) Pretty decent lab you have there !

Really interesting video thanks so much. Would have watched it even if it would have been an hour just to understand everything behind.

The last time I heard about home lab was from breaking bad

You should look into CUE and Timoni as a replacement for Helm. Very new projects but have tons of promise (and type safety + helm interop)

I'd love to see how to get HTTPS in Kubernetes with local auto renewal. Like Kubernetes Cert-manager or something!

Just get a bunch of used optiplex with 10th gen intel for fraction of the cost. up-to 64GB ram. Can even upgrade to 2.5/10/25/40 GbE anytime.

This video is perfect except for there being no chapters

neatly explained, nice setup! one question - aren't you creating potential bottleneck/inconvenience by using DRAM-less QLC SSD? compromising both performance and lifespan while not really saving much money or power draw?

Nice! I just added a Beelink SER5 to a RPi4 K3s cluster and was thinking I might want to add 1 more Beelink, thinking about the EQ!

I love your terminal and desktop! What do you use for these?

An honest question: what's the advantage of having multi-nodes vs say using a tower pc for all services? I can only think of possibly redundancy and it being more modular. A larger tower pc also has the advantage of being able to use spinning hard disks, lower total idle power consumption, and is easier to administer. It also saves the headache from networking complexities.

well I use NixOS and Incus that is a nice solution too

I like your funny words magic man

great, for the server I would recommend a minipc with dual channel RAM to allowing faster data transfer. What did you use for the loadbalancer between your master nodes with HA? The most common way to do it nowadays for simple homelab is by using kubevip or an HAProxy or nginx proxy.

Getting close to about a month, how are you liking the new setup? Performance wise is it what you hoped for? I'm very close to pulling the trigger on a setup like this!