Homelab

I)Introduction This has been covered a lot of times and a lot of places, but since I had an incident the previous Sunday (as of this writing) where my desktop ate its home partition after a power outage I figured it was a good time to write about backups since they were fresh on my mind. The 3-2-1 rule is simple and fundamental to backups. You have no less than 3 copies of your data, stored in 2 different forms and 1 off site backup. Although there are more standards that can be integrated, this is a good safe start… Read more: Some Thoughts on Backups

One of the great things about a home lab is that it gives a chance to learn via building out things that we may never otherwise, or in a way that is a new take on an old thing. In the Microsoft world, PKI is a dedicated infrastructure service, and even then seems to be somewhat of a niche. People who work with infra a lot are familiar with this screen: As it turns out, tons of infrastructure uses self signed certificates by default. It’s even worse if Java is involved. I’m sure there are some of you getting flash… Read more: PKI for a home lab environment

I)Introduction and pre-requisitesOne of the ambitions of my homelab is to start working with APIs more. I would like to start trying to integrate TrueNAS into my Proxmox Environment deeper than it is currently, perhaps even start dabbling with GUI elements at some point. To be quite honest, I feel less than impressed with the documentation TrueNAS provides around their API and how to get started with it. I am admittedly not a developer, but it seems sparse at best. Google Gemini has been helpful with this gap as of now, especially around things like syntax. I’ll start by linking… Read more: Getting started with TrueNAS API

I)Introduction Many think tape is dead within the data center. Over time, other storage technologies such as virtual tape libraries (VTLs) and object storage offload have eaten much of the market share that tape has had. Where tape has started seeing resurgence is customers who are mindful of ransomware. This guide covers how to use native tools within Proxmox to do backups. External tools such as Veeam or Proxmox Backup Server will not be covered here. This article focuses on VMs, and the commands to back up containers are not the same. A lot of the fundamentals will be the… Read more: Working with Tape in Linux

The purpose of a home lab is to learn. For me, it’s in many ways a re-visit of the work with computers I started when I was in my teenaged years. Although the systems I’ve worked on have evolved as has my knowledge, some things remain the same. First and foremost that you have to put the investment in to get the return. I am working through the initial iteration of this home lab. What that means is I have TrueNAS set up serving iSCSI, and I have three nested Proxmox VMs configured. Disk Pass through was configured to the… Read more: Hard Learned victories