Tailscale

Last weekend I moved apartments. Five Kubernetes nodes, a NAS, and a switch came with me. By the time I was done unpacking boxes, the cluster was already back online — and I barely had to touch the network configuration to make it happen. That wasn’t luck. Months ago, when I first built this cluster, I already knew a move was on the table at some point — nothing concrete, just the normal background awareness that apartments don’t last forever. So I made a deliberate call: route the whole cluster over Tailscale IPs instead of local network addresses. I figured if the day ever came, I didn’t want to be reconfiguring DHCP reservations and static routes while also carrying boxes down three flights of stairs. ...

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. ...