Author: Robert A. Williams

  • The First Tenant: Moving This Blog onto the Cluster (Series: Part 4)

    The First Tenant: Moving This Blog onto the Cluster (Series: Part 4) The previous three posts built a Kubernetes platform on Talos and Proxmox — control plane, CNI, storage, ingress, certificates, secrets, observability — and then had nowhere to put it. A platform with no workloads is just an expensive way to run health checks.…

  • From Bootstrapped to Live: the Whole Platform (Series: Part 3)

    Part 2 ended with six Talos VMs, an etcd quorum, and a kubeconfig — and nodes that were all stubbornly NotReady. That’s expected: Talos ships with cni.name: none, so the cluster has no pod networking until you give it some. This post is the rest of the journey — CNI, storage, secrets, certificates, ingress, monitoring,…

  • Bootstrapping the Talos Control Plane (Series: Part 2)

    Bootstrapping the Talos Control Plane (Series: Part 2) Part 1 made the case for Talos: an immutable, API-only node OS where every machine is described by a config file. This post is the how — turning six bare Talos VMs into a working, highly-available control plane, the way I actually bootstrapped mine. (Addresses below are…

  • Why I Run Kubernetes on Talos, on Proxmox (Series: Part 1)

    Why I Run Kubernetes on Talos, on Proxmox (Series: Part 1) I rebuilt my home Kubernetes cluster on Talos Linux running as VMs on Proxmox. This is the first post in a series documenting that stack — the why before the how. If you’re weighing how to run k8s in a lab, the OS choice…

  • Fixing a Black PBS Console Behind Nginx Proxy Manager

    Fixing a Black PBS Console Behind Nginx Proxy Manager The Proxmox Backup Server web UI has a built-in Shell — click it and you get a terminal in the browser, no SSH required. Except mine opened to a black rectangle. Cursor, no prompt, nothing. Here’s the five-minute version of a debug that could have been…

  • When Your Backup Server Shares a Disk With the Thing It Backs Up

    When Your Backup Server Shares a Disk With the Thing It Backs Up Backups feel done once the jobs are green. But “the jobs succeed” and “I can actually recover from a failure” are different claims, and the gap between them is usually a shared dependency you stopped seeing. Here’s one I found in my…