Home Lab – Techno Wizardry

Local Energy Monitoring using the Emporia Vue 2

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Home Energy Monitoring

I’ve previously explored the world of home energy monitoring systems and in the past arrived at using the Brultech GreenEye Monitor for a project in a friend’s house. It had the advantage of being local out-of-the-box and had a wide range of compact CTs that made fitting the electronics in the breaker box a lot easier, but it had one flaw that made it not suitable for my condo. It had to be mounted outside the breaker box with wires running into the box. I had no space in my condo, so I instead explored other options.

I came across the Emporia Vue2 and identified that it was running a standard ESP32 device and was easy to reflash with custom ESPHome firmware. ESPHome is an open-source framework for creating firmware to collect data from a variety of different sensors and publish it to MQTT/Home Assistant. This sounded perfect, so I ordered a Vue2 and here’s how I made it work.

Split Horizon DNS with external-dns and cert-manager for Kubernetes

There were a few services that I ran that I wanted to be able to access from both inside my home network and outside my home network. If I was inside my home network, I wanted to route directly to the service, but if I was outside I needed to be able to route traffic through a proxy that would then route into my home lab. Additionally, I wanted to support SSL on all my services for security using cert-manager

Since my IPv4 addresses differ inside my network vs outside, I need to use split-horizon DNS to respond with the correct DNS query. Split-horizon DNS refers to the DNS on one horizon (inside the network) showing different results than outside the network.

Kubernetes: A hybrid Calico and Layer 2 Bridge+DHCP network using Multus

This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Home Lab

Previously in my Home Lab series, I described how my home lab Kubernetes clusters runs with a DHCP CNI–all pods get an IP address on the same layer 2 network as the rest of my home and an IP from DHCP. This enabled me to run certain software that needed this like Home Assistant which wanted to be able to do mDNS and send broadcast packets to discover device.

However, not all pods actually needed to be on the same layer 2 network and lead to a few situations where I ran out of IP addresses on the DHCP server and couldn’t connect any new devices until reservations expired:

My DHCP IP pool completely out of addresses to give to clients

I also had a circular dependency where the main VLAN told clients to use a DNS server that was running in Kubernetes. If I had to reboot the cluster, my Kubernetes cluster could get stuck starting because it tried to query a DNS server that wasn’t started yet (For simplicity, I use DHCP for everything instead of static config).

In this post, I explain how I built a new home lab cluster with K3s and used Multus to run both Calico and my custom Bridge+DHCP CNI so that only pods that need layer 2 access get access.