Posts

If you work in IT support or at an MSP, Active Directory is something you deal with every single day. But unless you have a spare Windows Server license and a test environment lying around, it’s hard to actually practice — or break things safely. That’s where your homelab comes in. In this guide I’ll walk you through setting up a Windows Server 2022 VM in Proxmox and promoting it to a functioning Domain Controller. No production systems at risk. No expensive licenses needed to get started. ...

For years I used a commercial password manager. It worked fine. Then the price went up, there was a security incident that made the news, and I found myself wondering why I was paying monthly for something I could run myself on hardware I already owned. That’s how I ended up on Vaultwarden. It’s been running in my homelab for months now, it’s never gone down, and I’ve not thought about it since the initial setup. This post covers why I made the switch, how Vaultwarden works, and exactly how to set it up. ...

One of the things that surprised me when I started using Proxmox seriously is that it doesn’t just give you one way to run workloads — it gives you three: full virtual machines, LXC containers, and Docker (running inside one of the other two). Choosing between them isn’t just a technical preference; it affects performance, maintenance overhead, and how much of your hardware you’re burning for each service. Here’s how I think about it, and what I actually run on each. ...

When you decide to run virtual machines in your homelab, the first real decision is which hypervisor to use. Three names come up constantly: Proxmox, VMware ESXi, and Microsoft Hyper-V. They all do the same core thing — run multiple VMs on one physical host — but they’re built on completely different philosophies and have very different implications for a homelab setup. I’ve run all three at various points. Here’s my honest take. ...

My home network used to be whatever my ISP router decided it should be. No VLANs, no proper firewall rules, no visibility into what was actually happening. When I started running Proxmox on the HP DL380 G6, one of the first things I wanted to fix was the network layer — and OPNsense running as a VM turned out to be exactly the right move. This post covers why I went down this route, what you need to make it work, and a step-by-step walkthrough of the setup. ...

Port forwarding has a bad reputation, and honestly, most of it is deserved. You open a hole in your router, expose your home IP to the internet, and spend the next week watching fail2ban block login attempts from IP ranges you’ve never heard of. There’s a better way. Cloudflare Tunnels let you expose self-hosted services to the internet without opening a single port on your router. Your home IP stays hidden. The traffic goes through Cloudflare’s network. And setup takes about fifteen minutes. ...

Every homelab eventually has the same problem: services go down and you don’t find out until you try to use them. You open Jellyfin on the TV and it won’t load. You go to check Vaultwarden from your phone and it times out. You spent twenty minutes wondering if it’s your phone, your network, or the service — and it was the service, and it’s been down for three hours. ...

Storage is the part of a homelab that people tend to figure out twice. Once when they set it up, and once after something goes wrong. I’m running a Synology RS814 with 16TB attached to my Proxmox host over NFS. It works well — DSM is polished, the NFS share just appears in Proxmox’s storage pool, and the drives have been running without complaint for years. But it’s also a 2013 rackmount unit I got as part of a package deal, not something I’d necessarily recommend buying new in 2026. ...

So you want a homelab. Maybe you’ve been lurking on r/homelab for months, staring at rack builds that cost more than a used car. Maybe you’re an IT engineer at work and want a place to break things without a ticket being raised. Either way - good news: you don’t need to spend a fortune to get started. This guide is for people who want a useful homelab, not a showpiece. ...

Every month you’re probably paying for at least one service you could run yourself - a password manager, cloud storage, a notes app, a photo backup tool. Self-hosting these isn’t just cheaper; it means your data lives on hardware you control. Docker Compose makes this accessible to anyone comfortable with a terminal. You don’t need to be a developer. You just need a machine that stays on, a basic Linux install, and this guide. ...