2026-11-06: Notes and Research, while I fiddle with the servers

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 13:16:15 +0530

Collection of notes over the past week when I attempted to try move my Hetzner VM to some immutable operating system and then decided not to. Update: I seem to have buggered this up as well. I needed to write down the failure as to why I have not move and I cannot seem to find that post anywhere. Sigh …

2026-10-22
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Temporarily writing here while I move servers.
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These will move to my main blog when I’m done

2026-10-22
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Notes while I fiddle with the servers (2026-10-22)
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The Big Idea
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Move from Debian to Flatcar on the main server.
I wanted to move to something completely black box and appliance like Talos, but I am not that brave. I still want my K3s, and my instance is not that large that I can run full fat Kubernetes.

2026-10-22 09:45
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Good I decided to review my files. If I had just generated a new instance on Hetzner, I might have paid double for the instance I use (CPX32)
Moved my terraform state from s3 to local.
S3 meant my self hosted Garage instance. Found that I did not use it as much as I intended. So will retire it. (That will probably be phase two when I revamp the home network). Since last December I’ve hardly touched the state of the VM. So makes sense for me to maintain state locally.
Found that OpenTofu can encrypt at rest local tf state files. Time to move from Terraform to OpenTofu
2026-10-22 10:45: Buggered it up enough, between backups and moving VMs that the current thing will destroy my VM. that is what I don’t want! will need to see what to do. But the dream of just changing enough stuff is gone now.
my dream of an entirely gitops driven workflow is undone by the ai-pocalypse
options? am too used to this machine to downgrade. so will manually nurse it.
worst case option? will downgrade if it comes to that.

2026-10-22 11:05
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Just realised that the PHP world is on fire.
Taking a break from doing things above to adapting two images for my containers
2026-10-22 11:31: mistakenly created the wrong server. twice Grr!
2026-10-22 12:17: New server up and running. Had to change my ip in just two places. Good boy, old Jason for using variables everywhere. Break time.

2026-10-22 13:20
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Back to thinking ’bout what to do with Flatcar now
2026-10-22 13:55: Just realised I should go back and figure which of my workloads run PHP, and then upgrade them to the latest safe images/versions
- Sendy (14:37: done!)
- Baikal (17:45: done! vendored and adapted the unofficial, yet official ckulka image)
- Kanboard (left as is and will let flux automatically handle the upgrade. fguillot is pretty good at keeping his work, shipshape) (Update 2026-10-23 11:25): I was right. A new image shipped and the cluster moved to the patched version overnight

2026-10-22 17:50
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enough for today. will figure out the new node and flatcar tomorrow.

2026-10-23
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Notes and Research, while I fiddle with the servers (2026-10-23)
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The Big Idea
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Move from Debian to something on the main server.
Noodling on what that something might be …
Two main yet conflicting needs are
1. It should be stable and boring and well known like Debian
2. It should be amenable to being controlled with code
One approach will be to just having an OS that is completely configurable.
NixOS beckons. But I think that is a project for a machine at home, not for something that I want to run on the wide net and in production. (this is just a matter of comfort and opinion. Not fact. Other folks routinely do run workloads on the net with NixOS)
The other approach is what I’m doing. Nothing matches what I’m looking for more than Talos. But I’m a bit hesitant, because at least now, Talos (despite the MPL) is Sidero Labs. Not community owned like Debian.
After a bit of thought, well, if this is the risk to take, I’ll take it. And see how it goes. After all, I say I want something long term, but in the long term I figure out said something’s shortcomings (like I hate not being able to update Debian like an appliance) and then want to switch anyway.
So, I already learned all about containers and how to create and write them last year. So this year, the big change, in addition to Talos is Cilium.
The other thing I’m dropping is provisioning the Hetzner instance with OpenTofu/Terraform. A single node does not quite warrant that level of work.
Am pushing this to when I scale this up to AWS.
Think the VM should handle this. My current idle load seems to hover at a few % cpu and about 50% of my 8gb ram

Tentative Plan
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Create a Hetzner instance with Talos and Kubernetes on it
Cilium
Flux
Traefik
Letsencrypt
Move workloads from the other cluster to this one. (Examine and drop the ones I don’t need)

2026-10-23 17:20
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Got the instance up with Talos installed. Now to figure out more next week.

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Mail me at feedback at this domain.

Mjb-Cluster-Home on Janusworx

2026-11-06: Notes and Research, while I fiddle with the servers

2026-10-22 #

Temporarily writing here while I move servers. #

2026-10-22 #

Notes while I fiddle with the servers (2026-10-22) #

The Big Idea #

2026-10-22 09:45 #

2026-10-22 11:05 #

2026-10-22 13:20 #

2026-10-22 17:50 #

2026-10-23 #

Notes and Research, while I fiddle with the servers (2026-10-23) #

The Big Idea #

Tentative Plan #

2026-10-23 17:20 #

2026-10-22
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Temporarily writing here while I move servers.
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2026-10-22
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Notes while I fiddle with the servers (2026-10-22)
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The Big Idea
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2026-10-22 09:45
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2026-10-22 11:05
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2026-10-22 13:20
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2026-10-22 17:50
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2026-10-23
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Notes and Research, while I fiddle with the servers (2026-10-23)
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The Big Idea
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Tentative Plan
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2026-10-23 17:20
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