Hi all, just figured I'd put out there what I've currently got running, and see if there are any ideas on what else I can deploy.
Currently my haphazard "lab" consists of four old HP prodesk 400 clients that some office was tossing out. Originally I wanted to do more with virtual machines and playing around, but right now the main "functionality" is a Jellyfin instance for handling media. Since each box originally came with a 500gb hard drive (and at best there's only space for 2 full size drives inside), storage space is what's killing me right now.
So, as follows: Host1 (before I realised you could change the hostname to something cool): Setup running proxmox and truenas in a VM, should probably be more efficient to just put truenas bare metal, but originally I figured more VMS would be fun, and haven't been bothered to fix it
Artemis: the brains of the operation, running one Ubuntu server VM (again, really overestimated how many times I'd need proxmox), which in turn runs containers to handle Jellyfin, and a Minecraft paper server whenever I need it. All the storage is directly mounted in Ubuntu, which was a bit of a learning curve for fiddling with /etc/fstab
Citrus: Truenas core finally on bare metal. Makes up half of my media storage (2x500gb drives as separate volumes).
Ziegler: Spare storage box I spun up when I needed space to dump things. Running truenas scale (I saw Linux and started drooling, but still have no idea what I'm doing and if there's any real difference between core and scale for my use case). I keep it separate from the "Jellyfin boxes" right now, but will most likely end up roping it in if I run out of storage (currently too cheap to go out and buy 2tb drives just yet)
Any advice or ideas for other things I could deploy would be appreciated
My systems:
They're all running in a kubernetes cluster. Nodes are primary deployment targets, sunshine / raspi is set as not preferred, but will be deployed to if there's no other node with resources. Storage is done on glusterfs. Services are provided to network via metallb, and ssl cert handling is done via certbot. Ansible is used to set up and configure the cluster, making it pretty easy to add a new node.
In practice this means any one host can go down without services going down. It will take a 10-15 minute time for kubernetes to flag a node as down and not just rebooting or something and reschedule the services, but it's more or less self healing and usually already fixed before I notice it's been a problem.
As for services.. Some game servers, jellyfin, specialized stream servers for a project, nextcloud, postgres cluster, node red, grafana, influxdb, gotify, proget, a web server, and about 5-10 smaller personal projects.