Update on homelab projects

On December 14, 2024, I made the following post on Mastodon:

Homelab projects for this weekend:

Try out Guix as a daily driver

Take off the Doom Emacs training wheels and setup a custom Emacs config

Setup K3s cluster on my three Orange Pi 5 Plus devices

Guix is a no-go, because KDE Plasma is not an officially supported desktop environment on Guix yet. Nor does Tailscale have a reliable way to install and manage on Guix. Maybe when the Non-Guix maintainers decide to port Tailscale to their channel.

I’ve decided to keep using Doom Emacs for now. Once I get my K3s cluster up and running and in working order, I will take time to pick apart my Doom Emacs config. This would involve finding the packages and configuration that are builtin to Doom Emacs, which I mostly take for granted – aside from the ones I have defined in packages.el. I would have to find a way to conveniently manage packages without the doom sync and doom upgrade commands. But, for now, everything just works, and I’d like to keep it that way as I’m working on the K3s cluster.

I have my three Orange Pi 5 Plus’s ready to be plugged in. I have Armbian on a microSD card, ready to be installed to each of the eMMCs. I have ethernet cables running between my unmanaged switch and each of the Pi’s. Once Armbian is installed and configured on them, I will run an Ansible playbook that bootstraps the K3s cluster. I have a .org file as a reference. All I have to do now is cut the ribbon. Am kinda nervous about it, tho, so I’ve been kinda procrastinating. But, I’ve got this.

About two years ago I bought a PoE (Power-over-Ethernet) switch that supports gigabit ethernet. I stopped using it when I got 5Gbps Internet from AT&T when I was still living with my grandfather about a little over a year ago. Now that I live back with my parents, I have 2.5Gbps Internet from Comcast Xfinity. Since I’ve had no luck finding a 2.5Gbps PoE to USB-C splitter, I’ll have to make do with what I’ve got. There’s no reason for me to be a spoiled snob about utilizing my network’s full throughput capacity for this use-case – gigabit ethernet is ample, and I don’t need to spend more money on a 2.5Gbps PoE switch. I bought three 1Gbps PoE to USB-C splitters. When they are delivered, I will unplug the power cords of the three Orange Pi 5 Plus’s, plugin the gigabit PoE switch, run an ethernet cable from my unmanaged switch to the PoE switch, run three ethernet cables to each of the PoE to USB-C splitters, and plug the USB-C connectors into the power sockets of the three Pi’s.