Current Stage: Adding Flux to k3s

Zeik
Cookson

DevOps Engineer — Knoxville, TN

I was hired two years ago as a WordPress designer and developer at a Knoxville agency. The work shifted toward infrastructure over the last year. I kept taking it on and built a homelab to go further than the day job covers.

SURFACE: BARE METAL + CLOUD REGION: SOUTHEAST
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Recent Stages
Homelab Kubernetes Cluster
IN PROGRESS
Three Lenovo mini PCs running k3s. Ansible handles provisioning; Flux GitOps is being layered in now.
Kubernetesk3sAnsibleFlux
SURFACE: BARE METAL / TIME: ACTIVE / Q1 2025
Self-Hosted Services
RUNNING
A Beelink mini PC running Docker Compose: Immich, Mealie, Ollama, Paperless-ngx, Glance, Dockhand.
Docker ComposeImmichMealieOllamaPaperless-ngx
SURFACE: BARE METAL / TIME: ONGOING / Q3 2024
Logbook
2025-05-01 // 22:48 KUBERNETES FLUX
Adding Flux to an already-running k3s cluster
Bootstrapping Flux onto a live cluster is different from starting fresh. Reconciliation will fight workloads you deployed manually unless you annotate them first.
2025-04-18 // 20:14 OLLAMA HOMELAB
Ollama on bare metal: what actually runs
16GB RAM is enough for 8B models. Phi-3 Mini runs fine. Llama 3 70B needs a GPU. The quantized 4-bit version is barely usable at homelab speed.
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