Basic stuff and where to start Building.
Basics
Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform that includes Proxmox and Docker statistics, historical data, and alert functions. It has a nice web interface, simple configuration, and is ready to use out of the box. It supports automatic backup, multi-user, OAuth authentication, and API access.
Proxmox
Using consumer grade SSD or NVMe may be a short time solution. This post is about what you can do to avoid early death of your system disk. I have always had stand-alone nodes alongside the cluster nodes. And I also have a mini PC with Proxmox for travelling purposes.
Basics
Installing Pi-hole as a Docker container is easy and do serve you well.
Build
Monitoring your drives. It's easy and quick to see the state of your drives in a GUI. There is a nice app called Scrutiny that will give you a Dashboard displaying disk health at a glance. Runs on TrueNAS, Unraid, Synology, pfSense, QNAP, RockStore and Windows. Implement on Docker or real rust.
Security
As SUDO is the key to your entire system, you should consider making it secure by require login by 2FA and your password. We are using the Google Authenticator PAM module for this.
Docker
The VM clearly wins in terms of flexibility and security. The KVM VM is much better isolated from the host than the CT, can have full root rights, use features such as GPU pass-through and supports live migration.
Basics
Make it small, use Alpine images. The smallest of them all is probably Alpine. I also included notes on Dockge and Portainer. For most of my VM apps Alpine is more than enough. It's small because it's lacking the bloat from GNU.
MyNewLab
Use Ansible to ensure that your nodes, VMs, and containers (CTs) are always up-to-date. You can create multiple playbooks and execute them with a single command or through a script.
Build
This is a follow-up version of my post High Availability Pi-hole 6.
Basics
ZFS is the new normal and replaces the RAID card generation. Why - our disks are too big and the problems with bit rot had to be addressed. After the release of the code as open source in 2001 it quickly moved into MacOS, FreeBSD and Linux. This is a guid for Proxmox users. #zfs
MyNewLab
As we have moved, I need to downsize my lab drastically. I will create a series of posts how I create my new lab. Not only will I lower the number of servers but also use smaller machines, NUCs- and SFF-machines. As I need to do a lot of travelling, this will take a long time to get ready.
Networking
VLAN in our home and home lab. How to segregate, allow traffic between VLAN. Networking is the base knowledge we need to run a home lab. This is about how not why, The way is for you to read about.