With the guys all back together, they talk about the Fully Automated Install (FAI) system, Kubernetes, and their recent projects.

Jerry mentions K3S – a simple Kubernetes (K8S) deployment, Jon mentions he’s reimaging Windows on his Laptop, and has been working on his AWX (he says Ansible Tower, but means AWX) install and configure Github Repo. Al has a new Job doing DevOps on Azure and mentions CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or Deployment) and Azure DevOps. The new job will be more Agile, and be working in Sprints.

Al talks briefly about SnapRaid and MergeFS. With the assistance of Stuart, who previously guest hosted, they have been building a dashboard for Prometheus with Node Exporter and Grafana that shows a lot of the automated tasks that Al previously received by email, and now he just has that as his opening tab on his browser.

Jerry talks about what he’s done with K3S. Jon mentions he also has done some stuff with K3S and that he has that published in a Git Repo. The Git Repo he’s created also includes a script to deploy to multiple machines and to include MetalLB to make K8S provide a load-balanced connection across multiple K3S nodes, without needing an external load balancer. MetalLB also lets you advertise addresses over BGP.

Jerry says that Plex can use multiple nodes to transcode. He also wants to mount persistent volumes with NFS, and so he’s experimenting with K8S to do this. Jon mentions Rook to do cross-cluster persistent volumes, and it can use Ceph to do that.

Al asks why use Kubernetes rather than Docker. Jerry and Jon give their viewpoints. Jon mentions a blog post called “‘Let’s use Kubernetes’, now you have 8 problems” and some courses on Pluralsight about the Container big picture, as well as deep dive courses on Docker and Kubernetes. Jerry mentions Podman.

Jon talks about the youtube video he recently recorded, and the inspiration for it, in a video by podcaster Chris Hartjes he found on Pluralsight. The video is about Vagrant, Ansible and Inspec. Alan Pope (@Popey from the Ubuntu Podcast and the User Error podcast) suggested publishing the video on Lbry too, which Jon did. Jon talks a little about Lbry. Jerry and Al talk about how they consume content, and Jon talks about his motivation (mostly because of a comment from Reggie from The Coolest Nerds in the Room Podcast).

We talk about a question from Yannick in the Telegram group, which is where he asks if we can advise on “Setting up a secure access to your home network : the bad way, the better way and the best way”. We talk about SSH, running VPNs (like OpenVPN) using PFSense, or using Raspberry Pis (using PiVPN). Streisand (which provides tools like IPsec with IKE, OpenVPN, OpenConnect, and Tor).

Jerry talks about FAI – the Fully Automated Install project that he has used at work as a tool to build Debian based systems and CentOS based systems.

We mention that we have a Patreon account, and encourage our listeners to join us in our Telegram group.