Kubernetes

Some boys arrive at the ranch and you hear them before you see them. This one arrived and we never saw him at all — not for half an afternoon, anyway. The fault was not his. The fault was a cable that lied. The forasteiro showed up on a Tuesday. ARM64. RK3588. Eight cores, an NPU nobody at the ranch had drivers for, dual 2.5G Realtek NICs, one M.2 slot, one SATA port, sixteen megabytes of SPI NOR flash. He’d been living in Debene Ranch for months already, under a different name — Rock NAS, dressed in Armbian, serving ZFS over NFS like a proper homestead servant. But Dom Felipe had retired him from that job. The kid wanted something else. ...

🎬 ABERTURA Câmera abre num galpão escuro. Luzes piscando. Som de cooler. Ao fundo, uma silhueta masculina com 24 cores se forma na fumaça. É ULTRA2. Plim plim. Entra a música tema: 🎵 “Detalhes tão pequenos de nóóóós… Um swap que ninguém pediu, um kernel que não rodóóóu…” 🎵 CAPÍTULO 1: A CHEGADA DO FORASTEIRO Era uma noite quente em Debene do Sul, pequena fazenda de servidores às margens do Rio MoCA 2.5. Dona Felipe, matriarca da família e dona de todas as terras (e dos /24 inteiros, que ela mesma fez questão de subnetar com as próprias mãos), recebia um forasteiro vindo de longe. ...

🎬 OPENING CREDITS Camera opens on a dark warehouse. Blinking lights. Sound of cooling fans. In the background, a masculine silhouette with 24 cores forms in the mist. It’s ULTRA2. Plim plim. (That’s the iconic Brazilian soap opera sound effect.) Theme song plays: 🎵 “Such tiny details of us two… A swap nobody asked for, a kernel that wouldn’t boot through…” 🎵 CHAPTER 1: THE STRANGER ARRIVES It was a hot night in Debene Ranch, a small server farm by the MoCA 2.5 River. Dona Felipe, matriarch of the family and owner of all the land (and all the /24 subnets, which she personally configured by hand), received a stranger from afar. ...

TL;DR — A new Intel Core Ultra 9 285H (“ultra2”) joined my homelab this week. First Geekbench 6 run scored 1471 single / 12864 multi. That’s slower than the i7-12900K next to it on the rack. Six hours, two Talos upgrades, three diagnostic jobs, and one DaemonSet later, single-core jumped to 3090 (+110%). The villains: an outdated kernel, UKI silently ignoring extraKernelArgs, and a vendor BIOS that thinks PL2=75W is a reasonable default for a chip rated for 115W. Here’s how the diagnosis went. ...

There’s a moment in every homelab evolution where you stop and ask: what am I actually buying when I buy infrastructure? For me that moment came two weeks ago, staring at a renewal email from a SaaS I won’t name, doing back-of-the-envelope math on a Synology I almost ordered, and pricing out an EKS cluster for a side project that — let’s be honest — was never going to leave my apartment. ...

The Dream Back in the early 2000s, teenage me was obsessed with the iBook G4. That sleek white clamshell with its PowerPC CPU and AltiVec engine felt like the future. I couldn’t afford one then — but now, two decades later, I finally scored one: a 1.33GHz model for $67 on eBay, original box and all. Reality hit hard. The 60GB hard drive was dying The RAM was maxed at 1.5GB (after some firmware trickery) I destroyed the power button during an SSD upgrade This is the story of how I brought it back to life — and turned it into a (surprisingly capable) development machine in 2025. ...

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed here are my own, fueled by late-night coding sessions and an unreasonable amount of coffee. DevOps is all about turning chaos into order and making complex systems look like child’s play. My journey started with the lofty goal of becoming a Kubernetes Certified Administrator (CKA), but what started as a study exercise turned into an adventure with two amazing tools: Harvester and Salt. This post is part tutorial, part story, and entirely fueled by enthusiasm. Let’s dive in! ...