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This Blog Exists Because of an Unraid Update

·2 mins·
Homelab Kubernetes Unraid Nextcloud

It started with a button.

Apply Update. 7.3.

Routine. Unraid does this all the time. I clicked it, watched the progress bar, saw the success message, and moved on. Didn’t think twice.

An hour later, Nextcloud was dead.

  1. No logs. No obvious reason. I had just deployed Nextcloud to my K3s cluster a few days earlier, moved on to other homelab chores, and came back to a blank error page. My first instinct: something broke in Nextcloud. I never questioned that assumption. I just started digging.

I dug for an entire day.

What I eventually found was that the Unraid 7.3 update had silently reset my NFS export settings and stopped rpcbind from starting on boot. Nextcloud wasn’t broken at all. It just couldn’t reach its data volume. The problem was in a completely different system that I hadn’t thought to check because I hadn’t connected the timing.

By the time I figured it out, I had also convinced myself to run a full security audit on Nextcloud. Which I did. Which broke everything in four different ways simultaneously. Which took the rest of the day to untangle.

By midnight I had a working Nextcloud, a set of hard-won lessons about Kubernetes security contexts, and a story that I genuinely wanted to tell.

The problem was I had nobody to tell it to.

My friends think this is crazy. My family doesn’t know what Kubernetes is. My colleagues work in a different field entirely. The homelab community online is great, but it’s not the same as actually processing something out loud with someone who gets it.

So I wrote it down instead.

kostikidis.net is where I document what I’m building and what breaks while building it. The cluster runs on three Lenovo M910q mini PCs in Prague, managed through GitOps with ArgoCD, storage on Longhorn, secrets encrypted with SOPS+Age, public access through Cloudflare Tunnel. Production-grade infrastructure for a completely personal use case — which is exactly what makes it interesting.

I’m not an expert. I’m learning by doing, targeting the CKA certification, and eventually a platform engineering role. The blog is part of that process. Writing about what I’m doing forces me to actually understand it.

If you’re running a homelab, chasing a DevOps career, or just the kind of person who can’t walk away from a 503 error at midnight — you’re in the right place.

The full Unraid → Nextcloud → Redis disaster story is next. It’s a good one.