Hegemonikon

My personal homelab.

Why Hegemonikon?

The name comes from the Stoic concept of the hegemonikon—the "commanding faculty" that directs thought and action.
This lab is my personal sandbox for exploring OS design, Kubernetes architectures, and automation with a philosophy-driven approach:

• Purpose over generality: Every component is built for a specific role.
• Simplicity over complexity: No unnecessary moving parts.
• Learning by doing: This is as much about the process as the result.

Hardware

Device	Role in Lab	CPU	GPU	Memory	Storage
HP ProDesk 600 G4 Mini	Control Plane & Worker	Core i5-8500T (8th Gen) 2.1 GHz	Intel UHD Graphics 630	16 GB	256 GB SSD
Mac Mini	iCloud Supporing Services	M2	M2	8G	256 GB SSD
Raspberry Pi 4	Doorbell relay	ARM Cortex-A72	Whatever comes in the Pi	8G	SD Card

Platform Infrastructure

Still in its early stages—so far I’ve locked in the host OS, Kubernetes distro, and one supporting service. Expect this to evolve as I learn and expand the lab.

You can read more about my choices in Why I Chose This Stack for My K8s Cluster.

Host OS

Philosophy: I'm building a Special-Purpose OS (SPOS) for each node. No generic images that need post-install tweaking. Each OS:

• Has a specific role baked in from the start using cloud-init–like configuration.
• Is immutable by design—updates come from rebuilt images, not live config changes.
• Self-configures at first boot with everything it needs.

I use Kairos to accomplish all these features.

Build process:

It starts with a shared Ubuntu 24.04 base image, with a few extra packages added on top of the upstream version and Kairos' own version.

Kairos Factory produces two artifacts per build:

• Container images (for upgrades)
• Bootable media (ISO or RAW, depending on the node)

Name	Role	Status
ProtOS	K8s Homelab	️️✅ 🏃‍
KairOS	Kairos with debugging tools	✅
NoOS	Local-AI	✅ 🚀
ThurorOS	Doorbell	🔄

• ✅ Ready to be used on demand
• 🏃‍♂️ Running
• 🚀 Ready to be deployed
• 🔄 In development

More on this topic: What Are Special-Purpose Operating Systems in the Cloud-Native World?

Kubernetes Distribution & Container Runtime

I run K0s for its simplicity and architectural choices.

Why K0s?

I like the clean separation of control-plane components and the way their tokenization system works. The makers of K0s also created K0smotron, their implementation of Hosted Control Planes, which I’d like to experiment with in the future.

For now, I stick to the defaults that come with K0s to keep the learning curve smooth.

Supporting Services

At the moment, only one:

• mowa — sends notifications through Apple Messages and provides simple shared storage outside the cluster.
  Runs on a Mac Mini M2 (8 GB RAM).

Related Writings

• The Birth of My Homelab
• Why I Chose This Stack for My K8s Cluster
• What Are Special-Purpose Operating Systems in the Cloud-Native World?
• A New Dawn for Secure Linux in Untrusted Environments