Switching between Linux distributions often means relearning basic commands for something as fundamental as installing software. Understanding how Linux package managers compared to each other actually differ — not just in syntax, but in underlying philosophy — makes that transition far less frustrating and helps explain why certain distros feel the way they do day…
After hardening SSH, setting up a firewall, and configuring Fail2Ban, it’s easy to wonder what else might still be misconfigured or overlooked. Running a Lynis security audit on Linux answers that question directly, systematically checking your entire system against hundreds of hardening best practices and giving you a concrete list of what to improve next….
The switch connecting your homelab servers together often gets far less attention than the servers themselves, yet a poorly chosen one can quietly bottleneck everything from file transfers to VLAN segmentation. Picking the right network switch for your home lab matters more than it might initially seem, especially once your setup grows beyond a couple…
Proxmox’s built-in web interface shows current resource usage, but it doesn’t easily answer questions like “how did CPU load trend over the last month” or “which VM’s memory usage has been slowly creeping up.” Setting up a way to monitor Proxmox with Grafana and Prometheus fills that gap, turning raw metrics into historical dashboards you…
Not every network lets you configure port forwarding — university dorms, some corporate networks, and many ISPs using CGNAT make traditional inbound access impossible no matter what you configure on your own router. A reverse SSH tunnel works around this entirely, letting your home server initiate an outbound connection to a machine you control elsewhere,…
Running a homelab full of Docker containers means each one has its own image that can fall behind on security patches and bug fixes if you’re not manually pulling updates regularly. Setting up Watchtower for Docker updates automates this entirely, checking for newer image versions and seamlessly redeploying containers with the latest release, without you…
Self-hosted AI agents are quickly becoming a common addition to homelabs, and Hermes Agent has emerged as one of the more popular options for running your own private, model-agnostic AI gateway. Deploying a Hermes Agent server in Proxmox gives you an isolated, easily backed-up environment for running the agent, separate from your other services, with…
Network-level tools like Nmap tell you which ports are open, but they can’t tell you whether the web application running behind one of those ports has an actual vulnerability in its code or configuration. An OWASP ZAP web vulnerability scan fills that gap, testing self-hosted applications directly for common web security issues before someone else…
Plenty of homelab hardware only works properly when connected directly to a specific machine — a Zigbee USB stick for Home Assistant, a hardware security key, or a USB-connected UPS. Setting up USB passthrough in Proxmox lets a virtual machine access these devices directly, just as if they were physically plugged into that VM rather…
Pull almost any popular Docker image and check its size, and there’s a good chance an Alpine-based variant is available at a fraction of the size of its Debian or Ubuntu counterpart. Alpine Linux for containers has become the default choice across the container ecosystem, and understanding why helps explain some of the odd behavior…
Cloud-hosted Kubernetes clusters get load balancers automatically provisioned by AWS, GCP, or Azure the moment you request a LoadBalancer service. A homelab cluster running on your own hardware — like the Raspberry Pi K3s cluster covered in an earlier guide — has no such cloud provider to call, which is exactly the gap MetalLB for…
A brief power flicker that barely dims your lights can instantly crash every VM running on your homelab, potentially corrupting data mid-write in the process. Adding a UPS for your home lab provides battery backup that either rides out short outages entirely or gives your servers time to shut down gracefully during longer ones, protecting…