How I Broke My Homelab Before Breakfast (Thanks, Renovate!)

There are two kinds of people in the world:

1. Those who wake up, stretch, drink a glass of water, maybe journal...
2. And people like me, who roll over, grab their phone, and approve a Renovate bot PR before even opening one eye fully.

This particular morning, Renovate greeted me with: Update Longhorn from 1.10.0 to 1.10.1

• A micro version bump.
• A tiny, innocent patch release.
• Practically a rounding error.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, sit down, dear reader.

Trusting Robots at 6 AM: A Mistake

Without a second thought (or the first cup of coffee), I hit Approve.

ArgoCD ran. The update flowed through the cluster like a gentle breeze. Nothing screamed in red. I didn’t look for red, but I assume it wasn’t there.

Then I proceeded to upgrade the Longhorn engine version on all volumes.

Did I...

• check the logs?
• verify that volumes were healthy?
• confirm the cluster wasn’t on fire?

Absolutely not.

I closed my laptop with the satisfaction of someone who thinks they’ve accomplished something productive before breakfast.

Ah, the bliss of ignorance.

The Next Day: Trouble at Home (Assistant)

Fast-forward to the following day, around the time I was just beginning to forget that I run a cluster capable of making or breaking my marriage.

My wife walks up to me with the same tone she uses when informing me that the dishwasher is flooding the kitchen: "Home Assistant isn’t working."

I laughed internally, a soft "haha, sure."

Then I checked it.

It wasn’t working.

Nothing was working.

• Home Assistant was down.
• Several other apps were down.
• And all their pods were patiently sitting in the Kubernetes waiting room known as: ContainerCreating

Which roughly translates to: "I tried. I failed. Please send help."

One example:

1homeassistant addon-tasmobackup-68dd464c58-7hknn 0/1 ContainerCreating ...

These pods were hitting the same universal wall: Volumes could not be attached!

CSI: Kubernetes - Investigating the Crime Scene

Event logs helpfully reported:

• "Waiting for volume share to be available"
• "Node is not ready"
• "Bad response statusCode [500]"

Everything you want to see when your home automation stack is down.

Meanwhile, Longhorn logs were essentially reenacting a chaotic sitcom:

1mount: already mounted or mount point busy
2e2fsck: device in use
3mount failed: exit status 32

This was not a "healthy storage system" vibe. This was more of a "ghost is trying to mount the volume first" vibe.

The Heroic Troubleshooting Phase (aka Button Mashing)

Naturally, like any sysadmin would, I went through the Five Stages of Kubernetes Troubleshooting:

1. Restart Everything

• Deployments? Restarted.
• Pods? Restarted.
• Hope? Restarted, then lost again.

2. Blame the Nodes

• Cordon
• Drain
• Reboot
• swear
• repeat.

Nodes responded with "lol no."

3. Try Fixing Longhorn the Hard Way

I even went as far as fully reinitializing Longhorn on one node.

• Wiped it clean.
• Rebooted.
• Synced volumes.

It worked! - not!

4. Consider Full OS Reinstall

For a moment, I entertained the nuclear option: reinstalling Ubuntu. Then realized:

• It would take too long
• It wouldn’t fix anything
• I’d have to reconfigure everything
• My wife would ask more questions

And we don’t want that.

5. Sleep and let the Cluster Fairies Handle It

The K3s fairy is a myth. A cruel, cruel myth.

The Coffee-Fueled Breakthrough

Morning arrived.

I grabbed a coffee.

Sat down.

And THEN did the thing I should’ve done first: Check the GitHub issues.

And there it was: Longhorn issue #11932, staring me in the face like a disappointed parent.

Specifically this magical comment:

o.k., I can confirm: after disabling multipath on all nodes, my pods are starting up. Some more checks needed, but this may have solved the issue.

Many thanks,

Wolfram

Multipath. Multipath!

Of course the problem was multipath. Because nothing says "fun home Kubernetes cluster weekend" like an unexpected device-mapper fight.

The Fix (aka The “Why Didn’t I Do This Yesterday” Step)

SSH into each node:

• cordon
• drain
• k3s-killall.sh
• disable multipath
• stop multipath
• reboot
• pray

Command used:

1systemctl disable multipathd.service multipathd.socket
2systemctl stop multipathd.service multipathd.socket

One by one, letting Longhorn rebuild volumes in between, like a grown-up with patience and self-awareness.

Slowly and miraculously, the cluster healed.

• Pods came back.
• Volumes attached.
• Home Assistant rose from the dead.

Domestic Impact Assessment

My wife, upon seeing everything working again:

• Happy that her smart home automations were restored
• Unhappy that they broke in the first place

This is what the SRE world calls: Partially Degraded Relationship Performance

Dinner is on me tonight. Probably a dessert upgrade too.

Lessons Learned (And Immediately Forgotten)

• Patch versions can break things.
• Renovate is not a therapist, it won’t warn you.
• Always read upgrade notes.
• Or at least skim GitHub issues before nuking nodes.
• Longhorn + multipath = pain.
• Home Assistant is the single most critical service in any household.
• Sleep does NOT fix clusters.

If this post stops even one person from approving a Renovate PR before coffee, then my suffering has served a higher purpose.

You’re welcome.