I always wanted to have a home server, which I could ssh into from anywhere, and run my side projects on it. Last month I decided to create one, and I am documenting the process here.

Hardware

I had an old laptop lying around, which I decided to use as my home server. It’s ThinkPad T480, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and i5 8th gen processor. I installed Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on it, and it’s working great. Unfortunately, It doesn’t have virtualization support, so I can’t run VMs on it. But I can run containers, which is enough for my use case.

Software

I was going through different options for running containers, and I decided to go with Kubernetes. It’s a great tool for running containers, and it’s used by most of the big companies. However, instead of installing Kubernetes, I decided to run a development/learning on my server. This server isn’t intended to be used in production anyway.

There are many tools to create a k8s learning/development environment, Like Kind, Kubectl, or even Docker Desktop was an option.

Docker Desktop however needs virtualization support, which my laptop doesn’t have. So I thought of using Kind or Minikube, and I couldn’t find any major difference between the two. Though, Minikube is more popular.

Installing Docker

You can find the instructions here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/

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sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg

sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg

echo \
  "deb [arch="$(dpkg --print-architecture)" signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  "$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME")" stable" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin

Installing Minikube

You can find the instructions here: https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/ Minikube supports multiple drivers, like docker, kvm2, virtualbox, etc. I am using docker driver, as it’s the only one which works on my laptop. Podman is experimental, KVM, VirtualBox, QEMU require virtualization support, which my laptop doesn’t have. (I wish I had a better laptop :P)

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minikube config set driver docker
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minikube start --alsologtostderr -v=1 --extra-config=kubelet.resolve-conf=/etc/resolv.conf --container-runtime=containerd --cpus 6 --memory 14000
# --alsologtostderr is optional, it's used to print logs to stdout
# -v is used to set the log level, 1 is the lowest level, and 5 is the highest
# --extra-config=kubelet.resolve-conf=/etc/resolv.conf is used to fix the DNS issue, which I was facingA
# --container-runtime=containerd is used to set the container runtime to containerd, which is required for the docker driverA
# --cpus 6 is used to set the number of CPUs to 6
# --memory 14000 is used to set the memory to 14GB

That’s all folks, that’s all it takes to set up your mini Kubernetes cluster on your laptop. You can now use kubectl to interact with your cluster.

I will talk about connecting to the k8s cluster from your local machine in the next post and connecting it to SSH, we will also set up a reverse proxy to access the k8s dashboard from outside the server.

The plan is to eventually setup different projects on this server. Stay tuned for more updates.