The Bloom County Cluster

Balancing Hacker Spirit with Enterprise Discipline.

The Bloom County Cluster - Custom Rack
CASE STUDY

Project Milquetoast

The $140 Supercomputer

Named after the Bloom County cockroach who famously refuses to die, this node represents the ultimate triumph of persistence over planned obsolescence.

THE FIND

A Beelink GTR/GR9 (Ryzen 9 5900HX) bought as 'e-waste' for $140.

THE DEFECT

Failing iGPU caused instant crashes on Windows.

THE FIX

BIOS tuning + Proxmox kernel flags to ignore graphics.

THE RESULT

A stable, high-performance headless compute node.

Deployment Status

VALIDATED

7-Day Torture Test

ACTIVE

Phase 2: Thermal Cycling

PENDING

Promote to Cluster

Project Milquetoast - Beelink GTR

Node: Milquetoast

01 // The Iron (Compute)

  • Nodes (The Bloom County Cast):
    • portnoy: Lenovo M715q. Named after the grumpy groundhog (not the Barstool guy).
    • cutterjohn: Lenovo M715q. Named after the wheelchair-bound Star Trek fan, "Cutter John".
    • hodgepodge: Lenovo M93p. Manages Octoprint. Named after the rabbit.
    • rosebud: Lenovo M715q. Named after the basselope.
  • Storage: Hybrid setup with local Enterprise SSDs (Micron 5100 Max) and a dedicated Ceph backend running over USB 3.0 NICs on a restricted Storage VLAN.
  • The Rack: A custom 'Hybrid Build' using Amazon rails and self-designed 3D-printed brackets to achieve high density.

02 // The Logic (Virtualization)

  • Hypervisor: Proxmox VE clustering the Lenovo nodes. Leverages the Ceph storage backend to provide full High Availability (HA) for all VMs, allowing them to migrate instantly in case of node failure.
  • The VMs: Ubuntu Minimal instances named 'Oliver', 'Wendell', and 'Holmes' (Bloom County's resident scientist).
  • Orchestration: Docker Compose managed via Dockge. Chosen for simplicity and 'git-ops' style management over heavy orchestrators like K8s.

03 // The Nervous System (Network & Observability)

Segmentation

Fully managed network with strict VLAN isolation.

ManagementTrustedServersIoT/GuestDMZStorage

Security

Public-facing services are hardened behind Nginx Proxy Manager.

Visibility

A full 'LGTM' style observability stack.

AlloyPrometheusLokiGrafana

04 // The Archive (Storage & Backup)

  • Opus: An UnRAID server acting as the central repository for bulk data and media. Named after the existentialist penguin from Bloom County.
  • Backup Strategy: Opus hosts a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) VM, securing the entire cluster with incremental, deduplicated backups.