Home lab with NanoBSD, APU2 and Kubernetes on Raspberry Pi - 0

For some time I had been thinking about building a home lab (Kubernetes cluster) with access to and from the internet so I could research and practice with the technologies I care about, using low-power components that are as resilient as possible to power outages (to avoid corruption of storage devices). To get there I reused hardware I had bought at some point simply because it interested me. Without further delay, here is a network diagram of how this lab ended up:

To implement the internal router/firewall I used an APU2 motherboard from pcengines. The main trait of this device is that it is designed as an embedded system: it has no moving parts such as mechanical hard drives, no sockets for plugging in RAM modules, and passive cooling (no fan is required because it is a low-power device). Combined with the advantages of the NanoBSD project, that makes it ideal for this setup.

The APU2 motherboard includes the following features (among others):

• 1 AMD Embedded G series GX-412TC processor, 1 GHz quad Jaguar core with 64 bit 2MB L2 cache.
• 4 GB DRAM (soldered onto the board).
• 1 m-SATA slot.
• 3 Gigabit Ethernet ports.

As storage, a solid-state mSATA drive similar to the one shown below was used.

The switch used is the ProSAFE MS510TXPP. I chose this model mainly because of its PoE+ (Power over Ethernet) capabilities, which let me power the Raspberry Pi 5 devices over the network cable (a PoE HAT must be purchased for the Raspberry Pi boards).

The switch has the following features:

Web-based management with the following capabilities:

• VLANs: Supports up to 256 port-based VLANs, IEEE 802.1Q, Auto Voice VLAN, and Auto Video VLAN.
• Static routing (Layer 3 Lite): Supports up to 32 static IPv4 routes and 32 static IPv6 routes, plus an ARP table of up to 512 entries.
• Link aggregation / port trunking: Compatible with IEEE 802.3ad LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol).
• Quality of Service (QoS): Traffic prioritization based on ports, IEEE 802.1p, DSCP, TCP/UDP, and DiffServ with WRR (Weighted Round Robin) queues or strict priority.
• Monitoring: SNMP v1, v2c, and v3, RMON (groups 1, 2, 3, and 9), and remote syslog.

Port configuration (10 ports total):

• Standard Gigabit ports (1G): 4 RJ-45 ports (10M/100M/1G) with PoE+ support.
• Multi-Gigabit ports (2.5G): 2 RJ-45 ports (100M/1G/2.5G) with PoE+ support (IEEE 802.3bz / NBASE-T).
• Multi-Gigabit ports (5G): 2 RJ-45 ports (100M/1G/2.5G/5G) with PoE+ support (IEEE 802.3bz / NBASE-T).
• 10G copper uplink: 1 dedicated RJ-45 port (100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10GBASE-T).
• 10G SFP+ fiber uplink: 1 dedicated SFP+ port (1G/10GBASE-X SFP+).