Intro

Repository for standing up of a multi-master, highly available Raspberry Pi 4 K3s cluster using embedded etcd.

Raspberry Pi Setup

• Download preinstalled Ubuntu server image for Raspberry Pi 4 - eg. Ubuntu 22.04
• Download and install the RPi Imager here
• Write image to SD CARD
  • Choose OS->Use Custom
  • Settings
    • Enable SSH->Use password authentication
    • Set username and password eg. ubuntu/ubuntu as per Ubuntu image
• Boot Raspberry Pi's
• Assign or fix the host IP addresses on DHCP server
• Reboot Raspberry Pi's

Bootstrapping

The bootstrapping phase uses Ansible to build out the K3s cluster using the installation script method described here rather than using existing Ansible playbooks (k3s-ansible) that manually set everything up.

• Make sure you have a file called .secrets in the root and populate it with the secrets needed - use ./secrets/secrets.template as a starting point (.secrets won't be committed to this repo)
• ./cluster bootstrap-ansible will prompt for a password for the hosts in the cluster and will set up the ssh key - just make sure you have a public key under ~/.ssh/id-rsa.pub
• ./cluster bootstrap-k3s will install any prerequisites and set up the K3s cluster, finally copying the kubeconfig file to ~/.kube/config_homelab on the local host.
• mv ~/.kube/config ~/.kube/config.backup && ln -sf ~/.kube/config_homelab ~/.kube/config will make a simlink to the homelab configuration file. Alternatively just rename it to ~/.kube/config.

At this point you should be able to run kubectl get nodes and should list all of the nodes in the cluster

• ./cluster bootstrap-flux will get Flux set up on the cluster which will take over the management of the cluster from here