k3s-playground

Hardware

I run a four node K3s cluster running on Raspberry Pi 4b hardware.

Each Pi has a 64Gb Flash drive and a high performance 32Gb SD card.

Pod storage is on my Synology NAS which is backed up frequently to AWS S3 Glacier

✨ Fun Fact: I named my nodes after droids from Star Wars! They are R2-D2, C-3PO, BB-8 and IG-11.

Services and Apps

Networking

• MetalLB

Storage Configuration

• NFS CSI Driver
• SMB CSI Driver
• Longhorn

Database

• mySQL

Monitoring and Dashboards

• kubernetes dashboard
• UpTime Kuma

Apps and Games

• Jellyfin
• Minecraft

Coming Soon

• Vault
• LongHorn

Configuration

Setting up the Pis for K3s out of the box

Before the Pis are ready to install k3s, a few things need to be completed:

Create New Image on MicroSD card using Raspberry Pi Imager

• Choose Raspberry Pi OS Lite (32bit)

Once Imaging is completed, put the drive into the PI and boot to ensure that the drive is working

Power off the Pi and put the drive back into laptop to do some configurations.

Navigate to boot drive on your machine and select the file cmdline.txt

Add the following to the end of the file:

cgroup_memory=1 cgroup_enable=memory

And you can add this if you want to set a static ip address:

ip=<open IP on network>::<default gateway>:<subnet mask>

Next, open the file config.txt and add the following to the end of the file:

arm_64bit=1

Finally add a file called ssh to /Volumes/boot

eject the drive from your laptop and move back to the raspberry pi

Basic Configuration and Prerequisites

install vim to edit files nicely

sudo apt-get install vim -y

rename hostname locally

hostname ##newhostname##

rename hostname on reboot

vim /etc/hostname

rename the hostname without requiring reboot

vim /etc/hosts

Run raspi-config and update all local settings to US (timezone, wireless config, character format and keyboard layout.)

Check hostname is correct.

Installing k3s

update everything

fetches package updates

sudo apt update

installs package updates

sudo apt upgrade

install K3s for the Master Node

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -

To install k3s on the worker node we first need the token from Master

 sudo cat /var/lib/rancher/k3s/server/token

Install K3S on the worker node

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | K3S_NODE_NAME="node01" K3S_URL="https://192.168.x.x:6443" K3S_TOKEN="token from above step" sh -