Goals + Recap

  • Thank you PS, for being my sounding board.
  • Created repos and moved around directories and fixed scripts so that most of my infrastructure stuff is properly organised. Created the repos I needed for the new VM and the single node cluster that will run on it.

The Big Plan

  • The plan is to redo the cluster again and do my own instance of
    • K3s
    • Sealed Secrets
    • Certmanager (Not using it)
    • Letsencrypt (using pre existing Letsencrypt certs)
    • Get Traefik Ingress to work
    • Figure out a way to get certs automatically into the cluster
  • And once that is done, figure out an app to move (Miniflux or Hedgedoc?); 2025-12-03: Kanboard it is!
  • Begin by moving (lifting and shifting in popular parlance) Kanboard to the cluster
    • Cert will probably be needed (Wildcard cert works now, just like it does without the cluster)
    • Convert a docker-compose to kubernetes manifests
    • Learn how to configure an app with code
    • Learn how to store data and back it up
    • Figure out secrets, if there are any (for now sealed secrets ok, figure out vault and vault injection later)
    • Learn how to tunnel through and reverse proxy
    • Make Kubernetes manifests work with flux
    • Figure out how to automate deployment of manual manifests
    • Figure out how to migrate there if there is any in an old app
    • Figue out how to automate updation of images in manual manifests
    • Get another app (Miniflux) deployed
    • Figure out what needs to happen as part of the lifecycle. What you want in the cluster, what stays out, do they intersect, how do updates of cluster happen? VM (node) updates as well?
    • Then begin to think along the lines of Live Deploys. Prototype locally and once it works, migrate to production immediately
    • Convert Kubernetes manifests to Helm Charts (optional, based on energy)
  • Go live! Git is source of truth. Two repos.
    • One for the Main node and its update
      • Terraform will provision node and install package, setup firewall
      • Figure out how to get Terraform to get the node talking to the git forge
      • Structure repo, copy every thing node related there, and make sure stuff gets updated periodically and idempotantly, via ansible pull and a systemd timer
    • The other one for k3s and flux
      • Convert everything I have done locally to run on prod. Add more steps as you do them below

2025-12-08 09:00

  • Client call

2025-12-08 10:30

  • Beginning work
  • Installed the 1Password CLI tool and figured out how to read stuff into an environment variable. Will see how to integrate this with scripts over time. I am getting tired of copy pasting stuff. Plus a few critical secrets are on text files on the disk. The disk is encrypted, so I’m not that worried; but still.
  • 2025-12-08 11:10: Found https://yaml-multiline.info/. Pretty handy!
  • 2025-12-08 12:16: Lunch Break. Got into a flow state after a long time

2025-12-08 13:30

  • Back
  • Currently working on setting up and getting ansible-pull installed and working.
  • Ansible lint wasn’t working. Got it to work. Ansible and Ansible Lint
  • 2025-12-08 16:15: Tea Break

2025-12-08 17:15

  • Back.
  • Thought I had it all setup, and the VM gets deployed, but I cannot seem to login
  • Simplifying my cloud-init and doing things one by one
  • TIL, even if I botch my cloud-init config, keys are inserted into the root login, so I can do a root login and diagnose. This helps!
  • Stuff was getting stuck, because point 1. an operation had to be deferred to the end. Checking the second thing now
  • Figured it out. It was some multiline data, that is sticking in cloud-init’s craw. Now to base64 encode it and pass it.
  • Done! At least the Terraform bit :) The cluster’s up.
  • Most of the plumbing for Ansible updates is done as well. I can talk to my Git forge from the VM. Next step is to get VM updates working tomorrow.

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