Posts on Justin Cichra

Axzez Interceptor Part 2 - 5x16TB

Mon, 23 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR

I bought some more refurbished Seagate Exos 18 HDD’s for my Axzez Interceptor. Here are the results:

admin@interceptor:~$ lsblk | grep disk
sda            8:0    0 14.6T  0 disk
sdb            8:16   0 14.6T  0 disk
sdc            8:32   0 14.6T  0 disk
sdd            8:48   0 14.6T  0 disk
sde            8:64   0 14.6T  0 disk

But first, Ceph

I did try Ceph/Rook as I alluded to in the last post. However, it went terribly :) Rook in a k3d cluster got stuck before it could provision OSD’s, and Ceph Pacific did eventually load the dashboard and mark OSDs up/in, but it completely locked up when I went to make a storage pool, replicas 3. Sadly, you cannot run a single node Ceph cluster on a single-node Pi-based ARM system (but that’s totally ok).

Hands on with the Axzez Interceptor

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

I got my hands on the new Interceptor board from Axzez!

What is it?

The Interceptor is built on top of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 Platform. Jeff Geerling did a video on it back in Februrary, detailing most of the product’s features. I won’t go into those features here. I want to go over the stock Interceptor OS and the experience I’ve had in my first few days.

Hugo

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I ported my Blog over to Hugo. It’s building on Cloudflare Pages. Hello from the Edge!

Switching to CockroachDB

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

I decided to switch my website’s database from MySQL to CockroachDB. So far it’s been a great switch. I don’t have many transactions, but being able to do rolling no-downtime upgrades, drain a node without fear, and have out-of-the-box horizontal scaling is a huge plus.

What is CockroachDB?

CockroachDB is a resilient distributed database built on top of the Raft consensus algorithm. It’s a highly available, postgres-compatible open source project. It has support for geo-spatial data, and uses the Go programming language.

Transparent Wireguard Networks in KVM

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

The cloud is an exciting place. It unlocks new scalability features and managed services. But cloud is expensive, and running some workloads “on-prem” makes more financial sense.

I’ve been designing my personal infrastructure with a “cloud-first” mentality. Most of my cloud workloads are computationally lightweight, consisting of web servers, small databases, and light daemons. I run it all in Kubernetes, between two cloud vendors, tied with Wireguard.

The existing tie I have today between Oracle Cloud and OVH got me thinking…“why can’t my local machine be another ‘cloud provider’?”

Welcome

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello and welcome to my first blog! I’ll be using this site to document my projects. My first article will be on transparent wireguard tunnels in KVM.