Homelab

This series is the main trail for my homelab work. It covers infrastructure decisions, operational fixes, automation, hardware behavior, and the habits that make a small lab easier to run.

0 RPM, 24/7, 2 Years: A Fanless Proxmox Power Node

29 July 2026·Updated: 31 July 2026·5699 words·27 mins

Two years with four identical fanless mini-PC Proxmox nodes: the thermal pad saga, a 35 W power contract, Thunderbolt as a PCIe slot, and why the optics I wanted turned out to be a DAC.

Samsung 990 PRO Wear Bug: Flashing Firmware from a Live Linux System

28 July 2026·Updated: 29 July 2026·1043 words·5 mins

Why a 990 PRO reports 7% wear after 8 TB written, why fwupd cannot help, and how to flash Samsung’s firmware ISO from a running Linux system.

Proxmox Kiosk Desktop Appliance: Windows VM, GPU Passthrough, and Fast Recovery

16 March 2026·Updated: 14 July 2026·3101 words·15 mins

How to use PVE to run Windows desktops with GPU passthrough

Overengineering Homelab DNS: dnsdist, Pi-hole, Unbound

1 January 2026·Updated: 30 July 2026·3193 words·15 mins

An Ansible-managed homelab DNS chain: dnsdist load-balancing seven Pi-hole containers into BIND 9 and Unbound over authenticated DNS-over-TLS, with measurements and the test that lied

Proxmox Firewall Configuration with Terraform

11 December 2025·Updated: 23 February 2026·1251 words·6 mins

managing Proxmox firewall rules in a separate Terraform project

MikroTik Watchdog: Why 127.0.0.1 is not a good way to Disable Watchdog Ping

3 October 2025·Updated: 23 February 2026·186 words·1 min

127.0.0.1 is not always available ^_^

Debian 13 Trixie Upgrade on Proxmox

18 August 2025·Updated: 23 February 2026·823 words·4 mins

runbook for upgrading Debian Bookworm to Debian 13 Trixie on Proxmox VE

Known but Overlooked: Onboard E1000 NIC Problems in Proxmox

16 June 2025·Updated: 23 February 2026·272 words·2 mins

Running Proxmox on systems with onboard Intel NICs using the e1000e driver can lead to severe stability issues

Handling Unreachable Hosts with Ansible

3 June 2025·Updated: 23 February 2026·320 words·2 mins

filtering reachable hosts ( linux + net )

Proxmox GPU Passthrough: Fix RX 7900 XTX VFIO_MAP_DMA failed

1 May 2025·Updated: 30 July 2026·1280 words·7 mins

Fix black screen and kvm: VFIO_MAP_DMA failed: Invalid argument during Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU passthrough on Proxmox VE: explicit vBIOS romfile, rombar=0, and a working Windows gaming VM