Secondary server in Switzerland

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I built a secondary server at my parents’ house in Switzerland. It acts as an offsite target for TrueNAS replication and runs its own small Kubernetes cluster for workloads I want to keep running independently of the main homelab.

Hardware

The setup mirrors my main homelab — Proxmox as the hypervisor, Talos Linux for Kubernetes — but scaled down and built for a spare room rather than a rack:

No rack-mount chassis, just a small tower case.
A single pair of NVMe SSDs, mirrored, holding both the Proxmox boot install and the VM storage — unlike the main homelab, there’s no separate SSD pool on the TrueNAS VM, only HDDs.

Networking

Sensitive services such as the Proxmox UI and the Talos API are not exposed directly — they’re only reachable over Tailscale, which also links the server back to my main network so it can talk to the primary site.

Dynamic storage provisioning with democratic-csi

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My Talos cluster needed persistent storage backed by the TrueNAS VM that already manages my disks with ZFS. Rather than provisioning volumes on TrueNAS by hand for every workload, I installed democratic-csi, a CSI driver that lets Kubernetes provision storage on TrueNAS directly.

How it works

democratic-csi talks to the TrueNAS API. When a PersistentVolumeClaim is created in the cluster, it creates a matching resource on TrueNAS and hands it back to Kubernetes as a PersistentVolume, so provisioning stays entirely declarative — no manual dataset or zvol creation.

TrueNAS on Maxime Moreillon

Secondary server in Switzerland

Hardware

Networking

Dynamic storage provisioning with democratic-csi

How it works