My home Kubernetes cluster started out on a Core i7-920 with 8 GB of memory.

Upgraded to 16 GB memory

Upgraded to a Core i5-2400S

Upgraded to a Core i7-3770

Upgraded to 32 GB memory

Recently Upgraded to a Core i5-7600K

I think I’ll stay with that for rather long…

I did however add 2 Intel NUCs (gen 6 and gen 8) to the cluster to have a distributed control plane and some distributed storage.

I really don’t see much benefit to running two clusters.

I’m also running single clusters with multiple ingress controllers both at home and at work.

If you are concerned with blast radius, you should probably first look into setting up Network Policies to ensure that pods can’t talk to things they shouldn’t.

There is of course still the risk of something escaping the container, but the risk is rather low in comparison. There are options out there for hardening the container runtime further.

You might also look into adding things that can monitor the cluster for intrusions or prevent them. Stuff like running CrowdSec on your ingresses, and using Falco to watch for various malicious behaviour.

ZFS doesn’t really support mismatched disks. In OP’s case it would behave as if it was 4x 2TB disks, making 4 TB of raw storage unusable, with 1 disk of parity that would yield 6TB of usable storage. In the future the 2x 2TB disks could be swapped with 4 TB disks, and then ZFS would make use of all the storage, yielding 12 TB of usable storage.

BTRFS handles mismatched disks just fine, however it’s RAID5 and RAID6 modes are still partially broken. RAID1 works fine, but results in half the storage being used for parity, so this would again yield a total of 6TB usable with the current disks.

SSD longevity seems to be better than HDDs overall. The limiting factor is how many write cycles the SSD can handle, but in most cases the write endurance is so high that it’s unreachable by most home/NAS systems.

SSDs are however really bad for cold storage, as they will lose the charge stored in their cells if left unpowered too long. When the SSD is powered it will automatically refresh the cells in the background to ensure they don’t lose their charge.

My home-assistant installation alone is too much for my Raspberry Pi 3. It depends entirely on how much data it’s processing and needing to keep in memory.

Octoprint needs to respond in a timely manner, so you will want to have the system mostly idle (at least below 60 percent CPU at all times), preferably octoprint should be the only thing running on the system unless it’s rather powerful.

If I were you, I would install octoprint exclusively on your Raspberry Pi 3, and then buy a Raspberry Pi 4 for the other services.

I’m running Pi-hole and a wireguard VPN on an old Raspberry Pi 2, which is perfectly fine if you are not expecting gigabit speeds on the VPN.

It would be wonderful with something more granular than “NSFW”…

I would love if we got something even more granular like a "Content Warning: ".

Examples:

• Content Warning: nudity - might be a painting with nude people, might be a photo of nude people, in essence if it isn’t porn, but there’s exposed genitals, butts or breasts.
• Content Warning: porn - you can probably guess…
• Content Warning: gore - images with gore, people missing body parts, often dead as well.
• Content Warning: death - images with people dying, but without gore.
• Content Warning: blood - images with some blood, but no death or gore. (often seen in news articles)
• Content Warning: violence - people fighting, but without turning bloody.

These could of course be expanded with many more categories if need be.

EDIT: added violence by request

While shorter lived certs certainly improve the general security, certificate revocation lists are what you need if a cert gets compromised.

Wait until you set up cert-manager to issue both Let’s Encrypt certificates, as well as generating your own CA and issuing certs from your own CA where you can set the validity however want.

The reason a VPN is better to expose than SSH, is the feedback.

If someone tries connecting to your SSH with the wrong key or password, they get a nice and clear permission denied. They now know that you have SSH, and which version. Which might allow them to find a vulnerability.

If someone connects to your wireguard with the wrong key, they get zero response. Exactly as if the port had not been open in the first place. They have no additional information, and they don’t even know that the port was even open.

Try running your public IP through shodan.io, and see what ports and services are discovered.

As others have already said, set up a VPN like wireguard, connect to the VPN and then SSH to the server. No need to open ports for SSH.

I do have port 22 open on my network, but it’s forwarded to an SSH tarpit: https://github.com/skeeto/endlessh

Yes indeed, and the ability to parse JSON messages and further filter the results is quite powerful.

I use Promtail+Loki+Grafana on my home server, which is decently performant, light on resources and storage, and searchable. It takes a little effort to learn the LogQL query language, but it’s very expressive.

I’m running it on Kubernetes, but it should be pretty straightforward to configure for running on plain Docker.