That’s what I was thinking too. Ijust feel better having another layer between the open web an my server

True but I’m wanting to run VMs for specific tasks as well (mostly game servers) and I like to virtualize Linux distros I wanna play with as well as keep a running windows VM for the off chance I need windows ever.

Apartment is too small and my partner is too noise sensitive to get away with a rack. So my localLLM and Jellyfin encoder plus my NAS exists like this this summer. Temps have been very good once the panels came off.

Ansible is next on my list of things to learn.

I don’t think I’ll need to dedicate all of my compute space to K8s probably just half for now.

The rats nest is behind it

I need to re do some of the wiring.

I have all 4 power cables braided and zip tied together with the single data cable so its nice to pull out and put back into the entertainment center.

Only problem is I only had four 1 foot Ethernet cables and three 7 foot cables. So I used the 1 footers for the Pis and the 7 footers are bundled up as best I could and neatly hidden.

I’m waiting on some color coordinated .5 foot cables from Cables and Kits and I will swap the switch and patch panel. I want the Pis to have that one cable and that’s it, but I also want all the patch panel ports to work.

Rack shown

This is a 52pi 10 inch rack 8U

I have 4 raspberry Pi4’s 4gb running with POE

Some TP-link gigabit switch with 4/poe ports

3 Thinkcentre Tiny with a ryzen 5 2400GE 32 gigs ddr4 RAM, 512 Sabrent PCIE Gem 4 NVME boot/VM drive, 512 PNY Sata SSDs for databases

I have a bigger server for AI stuff and storage. This is just Tue “production” server for my websites and Git repos

I stole the set up idea from my man Jan Wildeboer

https://jan.wildeboer.net/2025/05/Cute-Homelab/

Done. Check parent comment!

Yeah!

So i am running these three computers in a set up that let’s me manage virtual machines on them from a website with Proxmox.

I want to play with a tool that let’s me run Docker Containers. Containers being a way to host services like websites and web apps without having to make a Virtual machine for each app.

This has a lot of advantages but I’m trying to use the High Availability feature when you run these on a cluster of computers.

My problem is that I know I can use the Built In container software in the already clustered Proxmox computers called LXC Linux Containers. However, I want to use a container software called Kubernetes but I would have to build Virtual machines on my servers and then cluster those virtual machines.

Its a little confusing because I have three physical computers clustered together and I’m trying to then build three virtual computers on them and cluster those. Its an odd thing to do and that’s the problem.

Quality answer. Glad my hunch was backed up by your experience. That’s very appreciated.

I hadn’t tried anything with Cloudflared and Kubernetes yet so it would be sick to see it just work.

Yes! They sell a NVME hat that I assume is for the Pi5 (these are 4’s I had laying around). It also moves the HDMI and USBC to the front.

Its the RS-P11 Expansion board. I can only find it bundled with the normal rack mount kit. I got mine off newegg from a reseller I guess so no expansion boards.

https://52pi.com/products/rs01-1u-rack-mount-for-raspberry-pi5-4b-with-four-rs-p11-expansion-board-for-rs-p22-raspberry-pi5?_pos=1&_sid=69a185129&_ss=r

Fair point. I was also thinking it would be fun to use CoreOS so I can get one step closer to ArchBTW

I have been putting off scheduling my next therapy appointment.

I want someone to prove his LLM can be as insightful and accurate as paid one.

Are you using LLMs as search engines?

Bold.

I use Gemma, LLama 3.2, and Deepseek to either fix formatting, summarize documentation to give me commands for Linux software, and write simple code structure for me to refine into working code.

Sure it takes longer to generate than a cloud compute would, but

1. privacy obviously. I know you dismissed it but that’s really the biggest reason anyone will have.

2. this feels better environmentally. I actually don’t know if that’s true, but it objectively touches less computers for such simple tasks. It would be wasteful of infrastructure to do it over the web.

3. it’s just cooler to have a conversation with my computer. I’ve learned a lot about how the whole process works and that’s more valuable to me as a non dev than just getting the end results.

My “production” home lab is 3 Optiplex 3050 with i7-7700. They work great and are pretty low power.

You got into Self Hosting for unreasonable ideological reasons

I got into self hosting to avoid AWS Fees

We are not the same

Got any recs? I can generally talk my company into paying for most anything education wise, but Udemy style courses work with my ADHD the best.

Thanks! I’m still on reddit brain.

Yes! Gods damn it. I had that up an everything on my second monitor.