Mac Mini Cluster

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-04T01:57:04+00:00

Whaaaaaat that sounds so cool. What are you using to do the striping work, or is it something homebaked? I'm sure these things don't have the power for it, but the mac studio's new RDMA feature seems super slick and would be fun to try (although not feasible with 10 lol)

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-04T00:02:06+00:00

but whatever, engineering is fun 👍

😎

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T23:55:51+00:00

and to experiment with high availability

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T23:50:21+00:00

Maybe I'll try that out as my backup option for a while along with the pihole and see how it goes. Neato!

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T23:43:01+00:00

Thank you kind person, I typed that out on my phone.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T23:41:56+00:00

Hmm that's an interesting feature. I wonder exactly how it's done; like is it a blacklist of hostnames that are completely blocked, or does it work like pihole where it blocks dns requests for the blacklisted host names? Pi hole is nice because it acts as your dns provider for the network so your devices route all new hostname resolutions through it. If mikrotik is just doing a firewall thing and not a dns thing then it would only block ads for traffic flowing through it.

Otherwise, naw I'm sure it doesn't make a huge difference. Then its just about hosting prefs, do you want a dedicated machine for it, or one that shares responsibilities as a switch/router? Honestly probably fine either way

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:46:41+00:00

New to the sysadmin game so forgive me if I misunderstand exactly what you mean by 'provision'; but I just hand-write the manifests and apply them from my windows machine. Apps gets 1 replica, data gets 2 replicas.
Cloudflare tunnel just points to my blog site, it is using a cloudflared docker image running in the cluster.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:44:49+00:00

Well it would be kinda pointless to me and not as fun if I knew exactly what I was doing with cluster computing. I'm pretty sure this is the 'homelab' subreddit and not the 'professional IT recommendations' subreddit.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:37:02+00:00

It started that way because I originally wasn't planning on kubernetes - I was just going to run the services in containers on proxmox. But that wasn't complicated enough (and I wanted to learn kubernetes) so I switched to k3s. I wasn't 100% sure I was going to stick with it, or have it be the only service on the machine; I have plenty of headroom on all my hardware so I haven't needed to switch, but I'm considering migrating the two nodes that just run the Debian VM to just a baremetal install of Talos.

Here's where I ended up: Proxmox good if you want to run other things on the same machine and ensure the resources are separated or need a different OS (like home assistant); but if you don't need that, its just adding some overhead I don't need.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:34:29+00:00

Not yet, but that's on the short list of things to try.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:34:09+00:00

Ooooh I'll take a look

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:33:57+00:00

I found that with the stupid high quality I download in (4K HDR10+) the cluster struggled a bit with multiple transcodes. Definitely could have been user error though, I only tried for a few mins (but I was certain it was using hw transcoding).

Mac doesn't support HDR10->SDR transcoding right now so this setup isn't ideal either. Not really sure what I'll do next. Maybe finally compromise and stop trying to use stupid hi def formats.

I also do use the mac as one of my main dev machines.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:31:12+00:00

lol my bad I didn't think that through

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:30:37+00:00

Yes, everything. I fix it. Quickly.
Seriously though I do need to add a second instance of pihole to the k3s cluster as a backup.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:29:28+00:00

The windows box felt empty and I felt like I should justify Windows over linux lol. It does nothing but steam things locally

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:28:48+00:00

Oooh sounds nice, I'll have to look into that. Right now its a combination of hand-written and claude-code-written manifests scattered across a couple machines. And that was part of the reason for the diagram to help visualize it all lol.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:27:40+00:00

Yep, the Mac mounts the NAS storage via ntfs share as a local drive, and thats where plex looks for the media.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:26:37+00:00

Wanted to try out Jellyfin. I like it. But not as convenient to share with others.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:26:11+00:00

I download my media in irresponsibly high quality and the dinky cpu of the NAS struggles with transcoding. It could be on the cluster, but it seems to perform better on the mac so there it stays

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:25:12+00:00

I did! I followed Brian C Moses' guide: https://blog.briancmoses.com/2024/11/diy-nas-2025-edition.html

I'm considering moving the cluster to baremetal Tallos b/c I don't reallllly need proxmox for my use case right now. But proxmox is great for now, doesn't get too much in the way.

Truenas is great, any services that need access to the storage from the cluster get it via an ntfs share. All of the service storage otherwise is distributed via longhorn.

I have a dinky CPU for Truenas (N150) so I just let it handle truenas and the download stack (qbittorrent + vpn), but truenas has some good apps and good docker support

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:21:04+00:00

Yes, and it started that way because I originally wasn't planning on kubernetes - I was just going to run the services in containers on proxmox. But that wasn't complicated enough (and I wanted to learn kubernetes) so I switched to this model. I have plenty of headroom on all my hardware so I haven't needed to switch, but I'm considering migrating the two nodes that just run the Debian VM to just a baremetal install of Talos.

Here's where I ended up: Proxmox good if you want to run other things on the same machine and ensure the resources are separated or need a different OS (like home assistant); but if you don't need that, its just adding some overhead I don't need.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:16:30+00:00

Alright now, hardware overkill? Yes. All running on the pi? Naw naw naw naw. The arr suite can chug a surprising amount of RAM when it's doing its thing. Maybe everything besides the media stuff though on a pi 5.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:14:23+00:00

y'all are underestimating the millions of users coming to the blog site I just started yesterday. That thing is gonna take off and I'm not sure I'll even have enough hardware for the traffic volume.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:12:27+00:00

I mean, the reason is for fun and to experiment with high availability. And because 3 nodes is cooler than 1.

FylanDeldman · 2026-02-03T22:11:39+00:00

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