MetalLB is a load balancer for Kubernetes that allows direct external IP ingress into Kubernetes clusters for access to pods and services. Whereas a product like Multus adds interfaces to pods directly (thus giving them layer 2 access to that network), MetalLB implements the Kubernetes LoadBalancer kind, permitting services to be accessed directly from outside the cluster on their own IP addresses.

Multus is a CNI plugin which allows containers to have additional interfaces added to them. It supports using macvlan to add interfaces to ovs switches, and fits the need quite nicely.

With Kubernetes, containers are considered to be transient. But obviously there’s a pretty strong need for being able to store permanent information. This is where Persistent Volumes and Persistent Volume Claims come in.

After having used CentOS for quite some time on my home server, I finally decided I’d had enough and wanted to change over to Ubuntu 20.04 instead. There were a few reasons for this - but critically because of the support drop for CentOS 8, and how far CentOS tends to run behind fast-moving projects like containerization.

I’m a fairly keen HomeAssistant user, and I also use Splunk for log analysis and as a lab for learning about it since my work uses it. I was pretty interested in getting Home Assistant telemetry into Splunk, and in particular into the metric indexes that Splunk can store for efficiency and longer-term graphing of data from all my sensors.

I’ve got a HP Reverb G2 VR Headset, which I’m pretty happy with. It requires some pretty serious GPU power to drive it though, which can be quite challenging. While the headset as it comes out of the factory is pretty well right, there’s some additional parts one can 3d print in order to improve it.