I’ve never done a base #Debian install on a physical machine before yesterday. The mini PC arrived, and I unboxed it and booted it into the pre-installed Windows 11. I used Edge to download the Debian installer ISO, burned that onto a spare USB stick I had lying around, and configured Windows to let me boot off the stick. From there it was a few minutes to configure the device (which included setting up WiFi which went seamlessly!), basically the base install plus sshd.

From there another reboot to confirm everything was working, I transplanted the device to its basement home, and a remote login to configure the wired connection and disable the WiFi. Then a single command to install the #k3s agent and done!

K3s configured itself, attached to the cluster, and started deploying daemonsets (ingress-nginx and nfs-provisioner). I restarted a deployment that had been on the ARM64 node, and it was re-scheduled to run on the new (AMD64) box, downloading the appropriate image and seamlessly running it. I was delighted at how easy it all was.

The whole process took about a half hour, including searching the internet for how to configure networking on Debian.