@jesse_b I avoid all that by booting my NAS off a USB key (there’s a USB type A port on the motherboard itself, so the key is safely tucked inside the NAS). If the USB key fails, the NAS PXE-boots off the router, which is also the Tang server. (In fact, in future I might just resort to PXE-booting in all cases, because if the router is gone my NAS won’t be of much immediate use anyway.)
That reminds me of a hot tip: have an installation/recovery image of your favourite disto available using PXE on your network, it simplifies many scenarios.
at any rate I've got everything up and running now just need to finish building the k8s cluster
and I think @Kusalananda owes me a few "I told you so's" because the kubernetes packages are all in snap now so it's different than any guides I've tried to follow and for some reason things installed with snap don't even run as services?
@Kusalananda kernel + initramfs for the NAS, grub + kernel + initramfs + rootfs over TFTP for installer images (wiki.debian.org/PXEBootInstall but I’ve been meaning to try netboot.xyz too)
the fun thing to do once you have installer images available over PXE is to scare visitors (if you know the PXE hotkey for their laptop) ;-)