I’ve brought a second node into the cluster but it didn’t go perfectly right off the bat so the third brick will be the proof. The reason it failed is that I had some fancy automation set up that already created an unattached volume on the second node, but adding pre-existing volumes is ludicrous, now that I think about it, and I only thought about it once I tried to do it and was told “No.”

Before I add bricks and expand the cluster, I want to see if I can use what I’ve got so far. I’m not concerned about the Kubernetes side, but as mentioned I have never used Gluster before, and I’m sure there are some kinks to work out.

The first concrete step in rebuilding my services infrastructure is building a virtual Gluster node, or two. I’m going to start with one to see how easy it is to add nodes. Actually I may as well install k8s as well and I’ll have my first brick.

Currently my Kubernetes cluster is based on Kubespray, with a single node on the control plane, dedicated to that task. The control node has experienced some hard drive errors which has caused it to go read-only a number of times, failing it out. Thinking about what to do has led me to thinking about a broader reconfiguration of my home data centre, with two major approaches.

Now that the broken laptops are mostly in a usable state (well, about 67% anyway) and I have some spare time at the end of vacation, I want to get Kubernetes running on them. First, I need a base install. And I don’t want to have to do that manually. Setting up a PXE boot server so these things automatically install an OS should be fairly straightforward, right?