Homelab
Second-hand hardware, virtualisation, containers, NAS, UPS, power use and monitoring.
Automatic UPS shutdown: setting up NUT in the homelab
How to use Network UPS Tools to shut down servers, NAS units and VMs cleanly in a power cut: driver, server, clients, thresholds and a real test.
Centralised logs in the homelab: syslog, Loki and useful queries
How to gather logs from servers, containers and network devices at home in one place: syslog, journald, Loki, agents, retention and useful saved queries.
Choosing a homelab hypervisor: Proxmox, XCP-ng and others
Type 1 and type 2 hypervisors compared for a homelab: Proxmox VE, XCP-ng, Hyper-V, ESXi and plain KVM, with practical criteria for choosing your platform.
Drives for a homelab: consumer or enterprise SSD, CMR or SMR HDD
How to choose drives for a homelab: endurance and TBW, power-loss protection, used server SSDs, CMR and SMR hard drives, noise and staggered purchases.
Documenting a homelab: inventory, network diagrams and runbooks
How to document a homelab without the pain: hardware and service inventory, IP addresses, network diagrams, recovery runbooks, NetBox and Markdown notes.
Hypervisor virtual networking: Linux bridges, VLANs and bonding
How to connect VMs to the physical network: Linux bridges, VLAN-aware bridges, trunks to the switch, NIC bonding, isolated networks and Open vSwitch.
Homelab power usage: measuring it, costing it and cutting it
How to measure a homelab's real power draw with a plug meter or smart plug, work out the yearly cost and cut idle watts through BIOS, drives and software.
OpenTofu and Terraform in the homelab: virtual machines as code
How to describe homelab VMs and containers in OpenTofu or Terraform files: Proxmox providers, state, variables, secrets and the plan and apply workflow.
Out-of-band management: IPMI, iDRAC, iLO and KVM over IP
What out-of-band server management is: IPMI, Redfish, iDRAC, iLO and KVM over IP, what they do in a homelab and how to keep them safe on the network.
PCIe passthrough: giving a GPU or controller to a VM
How PCIe passthrough with IOMMU works: hardware requirements, IOMMU groups, vfio, GPUs and SATA controllers assigned to a virtual machine, and limits.
Planning a homelab from your goals, not from the hardware
How to design a homelab: define what you want to learn or host, then estimate resources, budget, power use and space before buying any machine at all.
Prometheus and Grafana: a dashboard to monitor your homelab
How to monitor a homelab with Prometheus, node_exporter and Grafana: pull model, what to collect, useful dashboards, alerting rules and retention.
Proxmox Backup Server: incremental, deduplicated VM backups
How Proxmox Backup Server works: chunk deduplication, incremental backups, datastores, retention, verification, client-side encryption and off-site sync.
A Proxmox cluster at home: quorum, QDevice and high availability
How a Proxmox VE cluster works at home: quorum and votes, why two nodes are not enough, QDevice, the Corosync network, migration and the limits of HA.
Proxmox VE: installation and a well-reasoned first setup
Installing Proxmox VE and setting it up properly from day one: repositories, updates, storage, bridged networking, users, notifications and the first VM.
Racks, noise and heat: where to put a homelab in your home
How to house a homelab at home: wall or floor racks, depth, airflow, temperatures, quietening used servers and choosing the right room for the equipment.
DIY NAS: TrueNAS, Unraid and OpenMediaVault compared
A practical comparison of TrueNAS, Unraid and OpenMediaVault for a home NAS: disk handling, expandability, apps, requirements and typical use cases.
Updating a homelab without disasters: order, snapshots and checks
A method for updating homelab hypervisors, VMs, containers and firmware: the right order, snapshots, release notes, maintenance windows and rollback.
Used hardware for a homelab: mini PC, workstation or server
Buying used hardware for a homelab: pros and cons of mini PCs, workstations and rack servers, what to check before you buy, and the hidden running costs.
Virtual machine storage: LVM-thin, ZFS, qcow2 and raw explained
How to choose storage for virtual disks: LVM-thin, ZFS, directories with qcow2 or raw, thin provisioning, snapshots, cache, discard and real performance.
Virtual machines or LXC containers: when to use which
Differences between virtual machines and LXC system containers in a homelab: isolation, performance, memory, security and practical cases to choose well.
Templates and cloud-init: creating virtual machines in seconds
How to use templates and cloud-init in a homelab to create preconfigured Linux virtual machines, with user, SSH keys, network and packages in seconds.
Wake-on-LAN and scheduled power-on for home servers
How to power homelab servers on only when needed: Wake-on-LAN, the magic packet, BIOS and Linux setup, rtcwake and automatic shutdown when the job is done.
Where to run Docker in a homelab: VM, LXC container or host
Pros and cons of Docker in a dedicated VM, inside an LXC container or on the host: isolation, backups, updates, storage and organising your services.
ZFS in the homelab: pools, vdevs, ARC and scrubs explained
How to think about ZFS in a homelab: pool and vdev layout, mirrors or RAIDZ, ashift, ARC, compression, snapshots and regular scrubs without surprises.