Notes while I fiddle with the servers (2026-10-22)

The Big Idea

  • Move from Debian to Flatcar on the main server.
  • I wanted to move to something completely black box and appliance like Talos, but I am not that brave. I still want my K3s, and my instance is not that large that I can run full fat Kubernetes.

2026-10-22 09:45

  • Good I decided to review my files. If I had just generated a new instance on Hetzner, I might have paid double for the instance I use (CPX32)
  • Moved my terraform state from s3 to local.
  • S3 meant my self hosted Garage instance. Found that I did not use it as much as I intended. So will retire it. (That will probably be phase two when I revamp the home network). Since last December I’ve hardly touched the state of the VM. So makes sense for me to maintain state locally.
  • Found that OpenTofu can encrypt at rest local tf state files. Time to move from Terraform to OpenTofu
  • 2026-10-22 10:45: Buggered it up enough, between backups and moving VMs that the current thing will destroy my VM. that is what I don’t want! will need to see what to do. But the dream of just changing enough stuff is gone now.
  • my dream of an entirely gitops driven workflow is undone by the ai-pocalypse
  • options? am too used to this machine to downgrade. so will manually nurse it.
  • worst case option? will downgrade if it comes to that.

2026-10-22 11:05

  • Just realised that the PHP world is on fire.
  • Taking a break from doing things above to adapting two images for my containers
  • 2026-10-22 11:31: mistakenly created the wrong server. twice Grr!
  • 2026-10-22 12:17: New server up and running. Had to change my ip in just two places. Good boy, old Jason for using variables everywhere. Break time.

2026-10-22 13:20

  • Back to thinking ’bout what to do with Flatcar now
  • 2026-10-22 13:55: Just realised I should go back and figure which of my workloads run PHP, and then upgrade them to the latest safe images/versions
    • Sendy (14:37: done!)
    • Baikal (17:45: done! vendored and adapted the unofficial, yet official ckulka image)
    • Kanboard (left as is and will let flux automatically handle the upgrade. fguillot is pretty good at keeping his work, shipshape) (Update 2026-10-23 11:25): I was right. A new image shipped and the cluster moved to the patched version overnight

2026-10-22 17:50

  • enough for today. will figure out the new node and flatcar tomorrow.