Notes from the homelab and beyond — Talos Linux, Kubernetes, self-hosting, and the infrastructure that quietly powers everyday life.
ASUS ships no API, no SNMP, no metrics endpoint. I SSH into the routers on every scrape cycle and pull it all myself — proc files, wl commands, and hidden SQLite databases — into Prometheus and Grafana.
In the last post, I glossed over one detail that deserved more than a paragraph: building my own Talos images for the CM5. I mentioned talos-builder, dropped a GitHub link, and moved on. This post is me coming back to actually explain what that thing does and why it exists.
I already run cloudflared in my cluster — all external access flows through a Cloudflare tunnel. What I didn’t have was a clean way to publish new applications to that tunnel and apply my existing Access policies to them without clicking through the Cloudflare dashboard every time. This operator fix
I run OpenShift clusters at work, so when it came to my home lab I wanted something closer to that CoreOS experience. Here's how I ended up running Talos Linux on eight Raspberry Pi Compute Modules across two DeskPi Super6C boards — with NVMe boot, custom CM5 images, and this very blog hosted on the
