Did you check the gluetun logs? Maybe set them to debug level, they might reveal something

I liked my Pi 3B+ for tinkering around and run some services like vaultwarden or a VPN node with PiVPN (first OpenVPN, later Wireguard). They are great for stuff like that and don’t use much power. Not sure it makes sense to add them as nodes though as 2GB is stretching it, although Talos OS has a minimal requirement for worker nodes of 1GB, so I might still try 😄

As you can see I plan to use Talos as well, it sounds really promising what I read about it. For a CNI I plan to use Cilium and for distributed storage I might try Longhorn and see how it works. Apart from that I am still on the fence if I should run my nodes bare model or put a virt layer in between with Proxmox.

Not planning to run nodes as LXC at all. Just using them in my current setup for running services like Wireguard or Jellyfin.

At most I would create VMs for nodes, but still on the fence if I should just go bare metal or proxmox with virtualized nodes (VM).

Like the original Zimaboard? How do you like it? Reading online in forums or reddit, the feedback is really mixed.

I was looking at the Zimaboard 2, but the board alone is like 300€+ and then buying DDR5 with current prices…

I assume you are using pi 4 and/or 5? I would have some 3b+ laying around which don’t see any use nowadays. But can’t quite imagine to build a cluster only made up of these, I think they are too underpowered, unless being used as like a small additional worker node.

And buying new Pi 5 with 16GB of memory would set me back at least 200€ a unit, not including power supply or any case.

Oh wow okay, if I’d go down that route I would definitely do multiple VMs on that host. In my opinion, the whole clustering and self healing / HA aspect of Kubernetes is why I want to switch to it. I can do gitops with Podman/Docker as well, in fact I already do that including a renovate pipeline on my sel-hosted Forgejo instance. But having the redundancy of several nodes, if one goes down the service will still work or at least will be re-deployed within a couple of seconds, provided there is distributed storage (longhorn, ceph or even nfs cis) if its a stateful app.

Thanks for the link! I think I saw this project mentioned in some other post as well, but honestly didn’t look further into it then.

Oh wow 30 bucks a unit for 16 GB, that’s just insanely lucky to find a deal like that.

Looking around in my region, there is from time to time the odd deal where you could get for example a HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini with 16 gigs for like below 200€ if you’re lucky and with the right timing. But usually they will net you 260€ upwards.

Fair point. If I don’t want to just run a single node cluster, I will need at least 2-3 nodes aka VMs. Looking at like 2-4GB (as a bare minimum imho) memory for each, I would already eat into like half of my current 16GB of available memory. And this mini server is already running a lot of my critical apps, using more than half of the memory.

Well there is wg-easy which comes with a very decent GUI imho

Just tried it on my phone, can’t wait to try it on the computer as soon as I am in front of one!

Instead of touch controls, would using the gyro of the phone be a possibility?

I run most of my services in containers with Podman Quadlets. One of them is Forgejo on which I have repos for all my quadlet (systemd) files and use renovate to update the image tags. Renovate creates PRs and can also show you release notes for the image it wants you to update to.

I currently check the PRs manually as well as pulling the latest git commits on my server. But this could also be further automated to one’s liking.