Homelab

On my homelab I had an LXC named “debian”. It was a generic Debian install which served a multitude of uses, most of which I forgot over time. I was going through all my LXCs due to my previous adventure, where I set up a domain name with an SSL certificate for the services on my homelab. I got to this one and wondered what the heck this was for. Turns out a Kali build environment, several defunct scripts, and hosting two different long abandoned personal projects. Lord knows what else this box was subjected to in the past. ...

I have a homelab. It runs many services for me, each in their own little container with its own IP address. Considering none of these services are ever reachable from outside my network (apart from if you’re connected to my VPN), I never felt the need to introduce domain names or HTTPS/SSL. I had a simple web page that had a bunch of links to the IP addresses—complete with port numbers—that I used to navigate these services in my Firefox-based browser: Librewolf. ...

I have a ZFS dataset named data, mounted at /data, which I bind-mount into my LXC containers. The dataset is a three drive set with a lot of storage space. Basically, this huge pool of gigabytes is shared by all LXC containers that need to store serious amounts of data. Think Immich, for photo storage, or Jellyfin and all the movies, series and music it has to be able to play. As you may imagine, having several different LXCs write to the same “drive” may cause permission issues. ...

It’s about that time. There’s a new1 version of Proxmox VE in town and it has had a couple of months to “stabilize”. Now is the time to bump up the version of that homelab. I’ve pulled the trigger and did the upgrade. The following is my experience with doing this update. I’ve run into some issues, which all got solved and I didn’t break my server. Prerequisites You must be on PVE 8.4.1 or newer before upgrading. Check with: ...

I just moved my server into my server rack. This sounds silly, but it was a desktop-like enclosure, not a rack mounted one. I do have a rack mount in my basement, but it mainly held switches and the likes. Now it also holds my server and it’s amazing. The reason for posting this, apart from celebrating the joy of having done this and getting rid of the server sounds in the office, is that I figured there’s a tip to be had! ...

This is going to be a long one. I have spent countless hours setting up my Proxmox VE and the VM’s and LXC containers on it. It occurred to me that it might be wise to have a decent backup solution for this, in case something goes catastrophically wrong. Luckily Proxmox provides a ready-made solution for this and it is called Proxmox Backup Server or PBS for short. This post will go through how I set this up on my system. ...

I have a homelab, or more simply a personal server I run at home. It’s a small square black box that sits in my office, humming away. This server runs Proxmox VE1, a hypervisor. This controls pretty much everything that goes on, on this server. It has the ability to spin up containers, which it calls LXC’s. These are somewhat akin to Docker containers. Anyway, the process of spinning one of these up is super simple. Click a few buttons, allocate some space and there’s your ‘container’. ...