Calico

By the time TC-003 came around I’d already proven my Ansible playbooks could stand up a working Kubernetes cluster. One machine, one run, clean output. Figured that was the hard part done. TC-003 — my third test case for validating this automation across different hardware — was supposed to be the easy step before going public with the repo. Lenovo M920Q as the control plane, a Dell laptop joined as the worker, same playbooks that already worked once. Run it, confirm it still works, ship it. ...

If you’re building a bare metal Kubernetes cluster with Calico and you’ve also installed Tailscale for remote access — read this before you spend hours debugging pod networking. I didn’t. I spent the hours. Here’s what I learned. The Setup Four nodes. Two ThinkPad T480s as control plane. Two ThinkCentre M720q desktops as workers. I installed Tailscale on every node so the cluster stays reachable across apartment moves — Tailscale IPs don’t change even when your home network does. ...