Homelab
Posts tagged “Homelab”.
- Why I Self-Host
The reasons I give — privacy, cost, resilience — are all true, and all partly a cover story. I set out to build a little local-AI appliance and spent the night fighting NVIDIA drivers and firewall lockouts instead, and enjoyed it. That last part is the actual reason, and it isn't a recommendation.
- I Sequenced My Family. We Still Don't Have an Answer.
A rare-disease hunt across my family and my sister's family: one of the kids has a developmental disability and seizures, and after years of specialists, no diagnosis. I'm a data engineer, not a geneticist — but I had the same raw material the labs use, so I sequenced the families and built a pipeline to look. Here's what the doing taught me, including the part where the mystery held.
- Building a Local LLM Box That Doesn't Need Babysitting
A field note on assembling a small inference machine, putting Ubuntu Server on it, and getting a stack that runs stable for daily work without constant firefighting.
- The NVMe Specs That Actually Matter for a Homelab
Ignore the Gen4-versus-Gen5 number on the box. For a Proxmox box, two boring specs decide everything — and the retailer's spec table will happily lie to you about one of them.
- Migrating a ZFS pool to new drives in Proxmox
Moving a pool to bigger disks with zfs send/receive: build a fresh pool, replicate, destroy the old one, and rename — so Proxmox never notices.
- Passing physical disks to Proxmox VMs
How to give a VM direct access to a physical disk in Proxmox, and when you'd want to do that versus passing through the whole HBA controller.
- LVM Thin Pools in Proxmox
When to use LVM Thin instead of ZFS in Proxmox, how to set it up, and what over-provisioning actually means in practice.
- Creating a ZFS storage pool in Proxmox
How to add a ZFS pool to Proxmox VE and why it's the right storage backend for most homelab VM and container workloads.
- Identifying ZFS disks with /dev/disk/by-id/
Why /dev/sda is the wrong way to reference disks in ZFS, and how to use persistent identifiers to match pool members to physical drives.
- ZFS, BTRFS, and LVM in the Homelab: Picking a Filesystem Without Regret
A concise field guide to the three storage stacks every Proxmox homelab eventually has to choose between — and the gotchas that bite after the fact.