Homelab Guides

Plain-language introduction to the concept of a home lab, why it matters, and what you can do with one.

Use NUT or apcupsd to trigger orderly shutdowns across Proxmox, NAS, and containers, including hooks for snapshot checks and post-restore verification.

Choose hardware, prep the machine, and get it ready for Proxmox, Docker, or basic server duty.

Design Compose files that survive reboots and upgrades: pinned images, healthchecks, internal networks, named volumes, and sane resource limits.

Install Proxmox, configure disks, set networking, create templates, and prepare your virtual environment.

How to install, configure, and prep Proxmox for a stable home lab foundation.

Publish lab services to the public internet with no port forwards: cloudflared install, ingress rules, wildcard-to-proxy pattern, and Cloudflare Access policies.

Deploy a lean K3s cluster with Gateway API and Cert-Manager (DNS-01), front apps via Cloudflare Tunnel, and sync secrets with External Secrets for home edge workloads.

Block ads network-wide, run your own recursive resolver with Unbound, add local DNS records for lab services, and plan for HA.

Use a mesh VPN to skip port forwards and dynamic DNS, route lab subnets, run exit nodes, lock down with ACLs, and optionally self-host the control plane with Headscale.

Stand up a WireGuard jump point, segment guest vs admin traffic with VLANs, and route lab access through the tunnel using policy-based routing.

Decode, analyze, and understand DNS-based data encoding and tunneling.

One MFA-protected login in front of every internal app — Authelia config, NPM forward-auth, LDAP backend, and access control rules.

Scrape every host and container, build dashboards that answer questions, and route alerts through Alertmanager to Discord/email before users notice.

Understand TLS certificates, set up Let's Encrypt, use Cloudflare origin certs, and troubleshoot common HTTPS issues.

Centralize logs from Proxmox, TrueNAS, Docker hosts, and Pi-hole into Loki, wire up Promtail scraping, and add Grafana dashboards with sane retention.

Master the 3-2-1 backup rule, compare tools like Restic and Borg, and automate reliable restore-tested backups.

Incremental, deduplicated, verified VM and container backups: PBS install, datastore layout, retention, verify jobs, sync to offsite, and restore drills.

Run MinIO with object locking, ship backups from Proxmox and containers via restic, sync offsite with rclone, and rehearse restores with policy checks.

Pick vdev topology, ashift, recordsize, and compression that match your workload — and avoid the choices you cannot undo without destroying the pool.