My homelab is a 2 node Kubernetes cluster (k3s, raspberry pis), going to scale it up to 4 nodes some day when I want a weekend project.

Built it to learn Kubernetes while studying for CKA/CKD certification for work where I design, implement and maintain service architectures running in Kubernetes/Openshift environments every day. It’s relatively easy for me to manage Kubernetes for my home lab, but It’s a bit heavy and has a steep learning curve if you are new to it which (understandably) puts people off it I think. Especially for homelab/selfhosting use cases. It’s a very valuable (literally $$$) skill if you are in that enterprise space though.

Switched to qbittorrent+gluetun side car recently and it’s been pretty good compared to the poorly maintained combo torrent+OpenVPN images I was using. Being able to update my torrent client image/config independent from the VPN client is great. Unfortunately most of the docs are Docker focused so it’s a bit of trial and error to get it setup in a non-docker environment like Kubernetes. Here’s my deployment in case it’s useful for anyone. Be careful that you configure qbittirrent to use “tun0” as it’s network interface or you will be exposed (got pinged by AT&T before I realized that one). I’m sure there’s a more robust way to makeuse of gluetun’s DNS over TLS and iptables kill switch that doesn’t require messing with qbittorrent config to secure, but that’s what I have so far and it works well enough for now.

Look for refurbished units, you can get enterprise grade units for like half the retail price. I recently got a refurbished APC from refurbups.com. Comes with brand new batteries, mostly rack mountable stuff. Ended up being a little over half the price of a brand new one with shipping. Can’t tell at a glance if they ship to Canada, but if not I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a similar Canada based site you could find.

I considered it but RAM is very limited on the NAS and the cluster nodes, it’s my primary bottleneck. it would also be more volitile. the two SSDs are RAID 1 redundant, just like the underlying HDDs, in addition to the built in power loss protection on the drives. RAM discs are great if you can spare them and have a UPS though.

Fyi you will not be able to do live video transcoding with a raspberry pi. I overclocked my pi4’s CPU and GPU and it just can’t handle anything but direct play and maybe audio stream transcoding, though I’ve never had luck with any transcoding period. I either download a format I know can direct play or recently started using tdarr (server on pi, node running on my desktop when I need it) to transcode into a direct play format before it hits my Jellyfin library. Even just using my AMD Ryzen 5 (no GPU) it transcodes like 100x faster than a tdarr node given 2 of the rpi cpu cores. You could probably live transcode with a decent CPU (newer Intel CPUs are apparently very good at it) if you run Jellyfin on the NAS but then you’re at odds with your low power consumption goals. Otherwise rpi Jellyfin is great.

Good luck, I’d like to build a NAS myself at some point to replace or supplement my Synology.

It’s a great tool for knowledge sharing, ramp up and debugging. Definitely not something that needs to happen on every story. Stuck on something or working on a weird bug? Get someone on a call and walk them through it. New team member or old susbsytem not many people understand? Pair the less knowledgeable person up with an SME for the first couple tasks so they can pick the SME’s brain while they work and get valuable context that might be lost in code or the story description.

It also doesn’t need to drag on. I find 30 minutes is best because as you approach an hour+ attention is hard to maintain. Get on the same page, learn a few things and once your making progress move to async communication.

Pair programming is a tool and only valuable if you know how and when to use it.

Measure of a Man was pretty early, season 2 maybe? Pretty sure it was before this one. In any case, yeah I had the same thought. How many times has an organic person been taken over and done something terrible? Picard was a Borg, those weird worm things that infiltrated star trek, those ghosts that take over Troi, O’Brian and Data (again!), etc. Lower Decks has an episode where Merriner thinks Boimler’s girlfriend is too hot for him and spends the entire show trying to figure out what kind of creature she is or alien influence she is under. So yeah, common star trek trope.

Presumably cooler Star Fleet heads prevailed and realized this situation with Data was no different so he isn’t inherently any more risky than any other sentient being.

I don’t see how star fleet allowed Data to remain onboard after that one. Being in the tech industry I often feel the Federation’s infosec is lacking in often trivial ways (unless the episode calls for better security of course 🙂), but maybe they have just accepted that sort of thing as the cost of doing space business since it happens all the time. So Data’s benefits out weigh his risk.

Many databases or database clients have an “upsert” operation which is exactly this. Create or update this entity. If the DB supports it you can save an explicit lookup giving minor performance and code cleanliness improvements in application but might shift that performance cost to the DB (had to rollback a prod change not too long ago because someone switched to a PG upsert and it caused average CPU to rise, haven’t gotten a chance to investigate why yet, something about indexes probably).

Anyway, I tend to start with just explicit create and update methods and add an “upsert” abstraction if I find myself sprinkling lots of checks around making code messy. So I would go for “createOrUpdateFoo” in that case.

I host publicly accessible content on my network. There is a risk, yes, and it takes understanding and work to do it safely. My firewall is dropping packets from all over the world constantly from crawlers/bots. If you don’t know what you are doing, using something like tailscale is going to be way safer and easier.

So I have jellyfin deployed to my kubernetes home lab, router port forwarded to the ingress controller (essentially a reverse proxy) on the cluster. So exposed to the internet. Everything on it has authentication, either built in to the application or using an oauth proxy. All applications also have valid SSL configurations thanks to the reverse proxy. I also use cloudflare DNS with their proxy enabled to access it and have firewall rules to drop traffic that hits port 80/443 that doesn’t originate from those cloudflare proxy ips (required some scripting to automate). It drops a lot of traffic every day. I have other secuirty measures in place as well, but those are the big ones.

So yeah, if you expose your router to the internet, its gonna get pinged a lot by bots and someone might try to get in. Using a VPN is a very simple way to do this securely without exposing yourself and I’d suggest going that route unless you know what you’re doing.