Kubernetes has made handling persistent storage remarkably flexible thanks to the broad support it offers for Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers. In this post, I want to share how I set up the NFS CSI driver on my own homelab cluster, which relies on an NFS server packing a roomy 12TB of storage. If you are interested in getting your persistent volumes reliably served from an NFS backend, read on. I will use Terraform throughout because I believe infrastructure as code is the surest path to repeatability, transparency, and peace of mind. ...
Today, I want to share a practical approach to configuring automatic WAN failover on MikroTik routers using Netwatch. If you have ever experienced internet downtime because of a failure in your primary WAN connection, you know how disruptive it can be. While there are several ways to implement failover, my method gives more certainty by verifying true connectivity to the wider internet, not just a reachable gateway. How Netwatch-Based Failover Differs Previously, I posted about using static routes with check-gateway enabled to handle WAN failover. That approach is functional, but it only checks connectivity to your gateway. In contrast, using Netwatch lets us monitor a specific external IP address. This ensures your WAN connection is actually passing traffic to the internet, not just able to ping the next router upstream. It feels like a more robust solution for most real-world use cases. ...
If you’re like me and enjoy the seamless integration of DHCP and DNS that dnsmasq provides, you may have wondered how to replicate this on MikroTik-based routers. While MikroTik offers great flexibility and power, their out-of-the-box DNS integration with DHCP isn’t quite as straightforward. But with a bit of scripting and the right approach, you can get dynamic DNS updates for your DHCP leases. Let me walk you through the steps I used, so you can achieve the same effortless experience in your own network. ...
UPDATE: See this post for an improved solution to the same problem. Having a reliable internet connection is important to me, especially since I work remotely. Downtime can be incredibly frustrating and potentially costly. That’s why I decided to set up auto failover between my two WAN connections on my MikroTik router. Here, I’ll walk you through how I accomplished it using the router’s built-in scripting capabilities. Getting Started in the Web UI To automate the failover between WAN connections, I used MikroTik’s scripting feature. Here’s how I set it up: ...
One of the challenges when running applications that require TLS in Kubernetes is handling certificate management safely and efficiently. If you are using cert-manager, you are already automating much of the certificate lifecycle. However, a common question I encounter is how to expose those certificates directly to a pod and ensure your application can seamlessly reload them as they are renewed. In this post, I want to walk through a practical approach using the nginx Docker image as an example. ...
Setting up USB Passthrough with Kubernetes Sometimes, the only way to get a project working seamlessly is to give your workloads direct access to the hardware attached to your cluster nodes. In my case, I wanted to expose a USB Zigbee gateway, which I use with Home Assistant to connect with various sensors such as door and temperature sensors. The wrinkle is that my Home Assistant setup runs inside Kubernetes. This led me to explore a reliable and maintainable way to expose a specific USB device to a containerized workload. ...
What Startups Can Learn from the Airline Industry’s Approach to Crisis Having worked at several startups over the years, I’ve seen my share of high-pressure product outages and last-minute scrambles. In those moments, I’ve often thought that startups could learn a lot from industries where lives are literally on the line, like aviation. There’s a simple but profound framework from airline crisis management that I think every startup could benefit from: “Aviate. Navigate. Communicate.” ...
What Startups Can Learn from Airline Safety Culture Over the years, I’ve noticed that some of the best practices in the world’s safest industries often hold valuable lessons for startups. The airline industry, for example, has achieved a remarkable level of safety and reliability, not through luck, but by instilling rigorous processes and a deeply rooted culture of learning. Even though some of these ideas may sound familiar to those who have worked in big tech, I believe that startups have just as much, if not more, to gain from adopting these principles early on. ...