Homelab

A four-node Kubernetes cluster running on Turing RK1 modules, with a Raspberry Pi 5 as a control-plane node. Talos Linux, Cilium in native routing, Argo CD, VictoriaMetrics, OpenBao. Everything is GitOps; nothing is clicked.

This site is a directory, not a manual. Each tool's documentation lives with the tool — a second copy here would only be a second copy to go stale. What follows is enough to tell whether something is worth your time, and a link.

Talking to infrastructure

Two MCP servers, both in Go, both multi-arch. The distinction that matters: they write, not just read.

netbox-mcp : NetBox DCIM and IPAM. Ask what is in a rack, then record the switch you just cabled. Most NetBox MCP servers are read-only, which makes them a reporting tool rather than an inventory one — and an inventory you cannot update is an inventory that drifts.

homebox-mcp : A HomeBox household inventory. What is in the attic, what the boiler service cost, what that spare PSU actually fits.

Both publish an image and a chart to GHCR:

ghcr.io/excavador/netbox-mcp        oci://ghcr.io/excavador/charts/netbox-mcp
ghcr.io/excavador/homebox-mcp       oci://ghcr.io/excavador/charts/homebox-mcp

Running things on Kubernetes

homebox-chart : Upstream HomeBox ships a container image and no Kubernetes packaging, so everyone self-hosting it writes their own manifests. This is that work, done once — hardened defaults, native OIDC, Postgres or SQLite.

netbox-image : NetBox with the topology-views plugin baked in. The official chart can enable plugins but not install them — a distinction you discover at the wrong moment.

netbox-mcp-chart : Packaging for NetBox Labs' own read-only server, kept as a fallback.

Getting Talos onto small boards

talos-installer-rpi5 : The Image Factory cannot produce a bootable Pi 5 image for D0 silicon. The rpi_5 overlay ships rpi_generic's u-boot, which on a D0 board either fails to boot or comes up without advertising SetVariableRT — and without that, talosctl upgrade dies at the bootloader step. This builds an installer that works.

u-boot-rpi5 and sbc-rockchip are the forks underneath it.

The board the cluster sits on

The Turing Pi 2's management controller runs a fork of its own firmware: a health-gated A/B update that reverts a bad image by itself, a temperature sensor the board never had, a kernel-driven fan, and Prometheus metrics behind a credential that cannot touch the control API.

That one grew into a project of its own.

What is not here

The cluster's own configuration — Talos machine configs, Argo applications, network policy, secrets wiring — is private. Not because any single piece is sensitive, but because a public map of one specific network is a liability with no matching benefit to anyone else.

The parts worth reusing are the ones above, and they are deliberately standalone: none of them assumes this estate.