Today is a good day - finally settled on my mounting orientation for the slaves, and finally got PoE working on my Pi4 boards.

The way I've opted to mount the three slaves on the back will allow for another three slaves to be mounted below the current three.

The Tinkerboard is not yet connected; I need a different PoE splitter with a smaller/angled micro usb end to fit as desired.

So far the master Pi (running Buster w/desktop interface for the touchscreen) has been successfully booted via PoE power, as have the two slaves running Buster Lite.

Tomorrow I'm going to liberate a long Ethernet cable from work so I can connect the cluster to my home network switch and begin configuring the boards (static IPs, changing passwords, hostnames etc) and then hopefully get k3s up and running and a test MVC application running.

I'm also looking for ways to make this portable; as in to run independently of whatever network it is connected to. I would like to take this to work to demonstrate Kubernetes and containerisation, but i would have issues just plugging in some devices with a few statically assigned IP addresses following the 192.168.x.x convention.

I wonder if adding a small router to act as a middle man would be the way to go?

Answers on a postcard 😂