Some time ago I decided to setup seperate homelab network in my house, as my previous homelab server is more like a production homeserver which I don’t want to disrupt. It is not much, but I wanted to build something small, energy-efficient and from the parts I already had.

But back to the topic that made me curious - I kinda needed some persistent storage for pods in lab. Then I remembered that the Mikrotik (RB951G-2HnD) router i’m using have a USB port and I saw an option in winbox to create SMB share. I think you can image where it is going.

I’m still using my chromebook with coreboot as a portable thinclient. Due to small built-in storage (only 16GB), i’m also using microSD card as a secondary storage for larger files and project. However i was strugeling with microSD card not being mounted at boot (waiting for device), my solution was to just physically eject and insert the card at boot, but it is pretty inconvient and is probably destroying the card pins.

Recently, I was trying to upgrade my toy K3s cluster using System Upgrade Plans operator. Applied example manifest, control-plane upgraded without issues, but pod for upgrading worker node was constantly restarting with error in logs exec /bin/upgrade.sh: exec format error. I would kinda expect that issue on ARM system (although we come a long way in the last couple of years!), but my nodes are running on x86 CPU, so what is happening?

Currently, I have small, two-node sandbox k3s cluster on my Proxmox homeserver. It is great for testing new things in Kubernetes ecosystem, but currently i’m missing one thing that is pretty awesome on “real” cloud environments with managed Kubernetes services - additional persistent volumes. Of course, I can use local-path to get persistent storage in my cluster, but it would be cool to attach separate virtual disks per pod. That’s when i found proxmox-csi-driver.

At the beginning of this article, i would like to mention that i’m a noob when it comes to android custom kernel or ROM development, so some of these information may be obvious to some of you, but it was relatively hard to find one place with up-to-date information on this topic.

Backstory - why i want to compile the kernel for my phone?

My current phone is the Xiaomi Mi 9 - i’m very happy with this phone, it is more than fast enough for my everyday needs, and the photo quality (especially on gcam) is also pretty good. My main issue with this phone was under MIUI 12 - it had a couple of annoying bugs that will probably never get fixed: