• 4 posts
  • 8 comments
Joined 1 month ago
Cake day: September 11th, 2026
  • See the “monitoring” namespace

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    kube-prometheus-stack plus VictoriaLogs for logs, about 100 pods on 2 nodes.

    The whole stack uses about 2.2 GB RAM. Prometheus takes about 1.1 GB of that and Grafana about 700 MB. CPU is basically idle, around 0.2 cores.

    Prometheus has about 150k series and uses about 7 GB for 15 days of metrics, so roughly 14 GB a month. Logs are about 3 GB a month. Grafana itself is under 1 GB.

    It’s mostly the default exporters, so a smaller lab would need less. A 20 GB volume would be plenty.

    Prometheus is set to retention: 15d and retentionSize: 18GB. Anything older than 15 days is dropped, and so is the oldest data if the total goes over 18 GB, whichever happens first. It’s sitting at a steady ~7 GB now that it has a full 15 days stored.

I made a Grafana Master-dashboard to monitor my Kubernetes cluster.

Features:

  1. Health bar at the top, that will turn amber or red when things go wrong, and send push notifications to my phone
  2. CPU, Memory and Network utilization
  3. Database and Storage backup statuses

I also added CPU/Memory usage request monitoring so that I can tune how much CPU/Memory a pod requests in the cluster.
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And active alerts
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I’ve muted these two, I need to add a 3rd node with more CPU and ram, currently if one node goes down there isn’t enough redundancy for the cluster to just keep working.

Lots more detail here: https://erasmus.works/ It’s all Open-Source, leave a Star on my repo if you like what you see.

  • I have basically taken a power strip, and made each plug a module.

    image

    The inside of a power strip, like in this image, is in series.

    mains → yellow → red → blue → green → blue(end)

    If a join between yellow and red is broken, it knocks out red and everything after it.

    If what is plugged into yellow is plugged out, or disconnects everything else keeps working.

    The same is true for my setup, the joins between Yellow, red etc. are just on the outside of the case, so you can disconnect them if you want, which would kill the power to what is after it. But you don’t have to do that.

  • Thanks yea I made sure to add this Safety section to my write-up on how to build this yourself, and I reference back to it a lot, so it’s painfully clear.

    I printed this in PETG which can take the heat easily, but ideally you use UL 94 V-0 which is also flame retardant.

    I did make sure everything is very well insulated, and pulled hard on every connection to make sure it’s held down properly.

    **Safety**  
    
    This part carries live mains. Mains wiring kills people who get it wrong, and a fault in a printed enclosure can start a fire.  
    
    Do not build it unless you are competent to wire mains and permitted to do so where you live. Sleeve or shroud all live terminals. PLA softens around 60 °C, PETG around 80 °C. Neither is flame retardant. Only a UL 94 V-0 filament is.  
    
    Wire the protective earth if anything you plug in needs it.  
    
    Build it at your own risk. I take no responsibility for injury, death, fire, or damage resulting from anything in this repository.  
    

I’ve seen so many 10" servers that look amazing from the front and very polished, but then having a rats nest of cables and a mess at the back.

After 62 iterations and many 3D prints, blood, sweat, profanity and tears. I my design and implementation is finally done. image
I used Hexagons where possible, because as you know, Hexagons are the bestagons

This is Before:
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And the After:
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The ducky adds 200MHz

The front of my mini-rack is actually still somewhat of a mess, I thought I’d focus on the back first.

I’ve published it in excruciating detail on my GitHub Leave a Star if you like what you see.

I self host a bunch of stuff on here to get away from Big-Tech, and because I find it fun. For a lot more details see https://erasmus.works/

It always bothered me the the fronts of racs are modular, but not the backs, this solves that
If you have any questions feel free to ask, hopefully this helps other clear up their rats nests.

I made a brand new account, and on first login this is my feed.

Not sure if it’s just this instance that has this issue, but perhaps some on-boarding? Or a better default feed, that would appeal to “Average” people, and show some casual subs etc.

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It would be nice to have the default feed be more diverse, or even better have a screen that says “Hey here are ~50 popular topics, click the ones you’re interested in”

User retention might not be great if the default feed is this.