Some time ago I described more carefully documenting my home data centre. In the months since I’ve found it useful to informally replicate at home some of the best-practices stuff I’ve used professionally for years. This isn’t amazing stuff. It’s just documentation. I’m a bit of a documentation geek though. Description of problem (Did you see what I did there.) I’ve had documentation before for the various computers and network devices and layouts I tinker with in my late-night leisure, but they’ve typically suffered from various, serious deficiencies:

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?

Before I describe the overall plan, I’ll describe my plan for documenting everything. There are a couple of reasons I’m going rather formal for my home data centre. They’re actually pretty close to the reasons you go formal with an actual data centre, to be honest.