When I set out for Springdale, Newfoundland, the plan was simple: take my portable mini-cluster off-grid, fire it up in a cabin overlooking the water, and prove that survival computing could be done.

The reality? My cluster had other plans.

When the Nodes Went Dark

On first boot, only one out of three nodes came alive. The other two refused to power on. My “survival cluster” had slipped into survival mode itself.

I went into troubleshooting overdrive:
- Swapped cables: tried each with known-good spares.
- Power check: tested with a 100W charger to rule out wattage issues.
- SD card shuffle: moved cards from the failed nodes into the working one — but they remained inaccessible.

Despite every swap and test, nothing brought the two downed nodes back.

Going It Alone

I made the call to push forward with the single surviving node. On its USB storage, inside the node-storage directory, I found a backup tar.gz. That was my lifeline. I copied it to the root directory, extracted the website source code, activated the Python virtual environment, and manually launched the app script.

Against all odds, the blog site came online. My own log of this very adventure was now live, hosted on a single stubborn node at a cabin in Newfoundland.

Rebuilding the Cluster

I wasn’t done yet. One of the failed nodes was eventually coaxed back to life using a fresh base image from FriendlyElec. That brought me up to 2 of 3 nodes working — enough to breathe a little easier, but far from a full cluster.

The next stage is the real grind: reinstalling Syncthing and painstakingly rebuilding the cluster mesh. Without it, resilience is only half there. Tonight, the rebuild begins.

The Lesson

Springdale taught me that survival computing isn’t just about running services in rugged places. It’s about recovering under failure, improvising with what you have, and keeping things alive with duct-tape fixes and determination.

The cluster fought back — but so did I. And this is only the start of the rebuild.