Check out 9 Proxmox Features That Quietly Improved How I Manage My Home Lab #proxmox #homelab #proxmoxfeatures https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2026/06/9-proxmox-features-that-quietly-improved-how-i-manage-my-home-lab/

Check these out, highly recommend if you haven't tried these already: 9 Linux Management Tools Worth Deploying in Your Home Lab This Weekend #linux #homelab #homeserver #learningprojects https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2026/06/9-linux-management-tools-worth-deploying-in-your-home-lab-this-weekend/

The Project Objectives: 1. Learn about homelabbing by creating own homelab server 2. Create a music streaming server that can play bit-perfect song anywhere. 3. Automate music downloading for music streaming server. 4. Create a private cloud to store data. 5. Create a portfolio showcasing resume/cv. 6. Create a game server to play with friends. Hardware & Software:- 1. SudoBox Mini PC (r7 7345hs, 24gb ram and 2tb storage) 2. TP Link TL-SG108E Switch (Easy managed) 3. OpenWRT Router (Still Finding under budget 1.5k INR) 4. Proxmox Hypervisor 5. OPNsense as firewall 6. Navidrom as music streaming service 7. Nextcloud as cloud storage Limitations: 1. Have no more budget left. (bad choice spent all on hardware) 2. Can not have my home network distrubted at all. (so no opensense as firewall for whole network, else will need another hardware) 3. Do not have static ipv4, also behind cgnat. 4. ISP do not provide ipv6 as per them, the ipv6 service is still in launching phase. (ISP: Comway) The Whole Plan: I will put the isp router in bridge mode as soon as I got my hands on OpenWRT router within 1.5k INR budget (decent one), and use that to manage vlans as per the network diagram. Till then I am just plugging server directly to isp router to atleast get it running. I am using oracle cloud arm instances that is free to use (4ocpu and 24gb ram, I have created payg account as always free tier account only have half of that limit as per new oracle guidelines), I will divide the arm resources into two. i.e. 2ocpu with 12gb ram each. On Oracle Cloud Side:- 1. On instance 1 (public-gateway_node): I will have headscale running to create secure wireguard tunnel to my home server. Will put nginx reverse proxy for resloving routing. Will have portfolio hosted on it. Will have a blog/journal website which will keep track of my all the project failier and success both for the public. 2. On instance 2 (Minecraft Server): as per the name, it will have minecraft server running for me and my friends to play. May change it to other games server as per our requirements.

Why Quadlets Finally Made Podman Click for Me in the Home Lab https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2026/06/why-quadlets-finally-made-podman-click-for-me-in-the-home-lab/

Hello fellow homelabbers, After recently migrating my homelab DNS infrastructure from Pi-hole to a High-Availability Technitium DNS Cluster, I wanted to share my architecture, findings, and performance testing results with the community. When designing a homelab DNS setup, you face multiple implementation choices. Because I am running my two DNS instances on significantly different generations of hardware, finding the optimal configuration required some real-world benchmarking.The Hardware & Topology. My Proxmox environment utilizes two distinct physical hosts:Lenovo ThinkStation P520 – Running an Intel Xeon W-2135 CPU (released in 2017).Aoostar WTR Pro Max – Running an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU (released in 2024).The 2024 Ryzen CPU is substantially more powerful than the 2017 Xeon. To optimize performance based on this hardware asymmetry, I configured my router's DHCP scope to lease the Aoostar instance (192.168.11.51) as the Primary DNS server, and the Lenovo instance (192.168.11.50) as the Secondary DNS server. This ensures the bulk of the network load is handled by the faster CPU, while the older hardware stands by as a seamless failover node. Both servers stay perfectly synchronized using the built-in Technitium Cluster Sync application. The Architecture: Solving the Encryption vs. Autonomy Paradox.My goal was absolute privacy inside my network, combined with complete independence from upstream public DNS providers (like Cloudflare, Google, or Quad9). Achieving this requires balancing two distinct traffic directions:Inbound (Client to Homelab): DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH)To secure local network traffic, I deployed Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) inside my Docker environment. NPM handles the incoming HTTPS connections on port 443 using a valid Let's Encrypt Wildcard Certificate. To prevent complex Nginx database and SSL handshake issues (ERR_SSL_UNRECOGNIZED_NAME_ALERT), I kept NPM clean. I created two straightforward Proxy Hosts (dns1.patad.nl and dns2.patad.nl) that route traffic on the backend directly to the Technitium LXC containers on a custom DNS-over-HTTP port (8053).To make this accessible locally without routing traffic out to the internet, I configured a Split-Horizon DNS zone within Technitium for (my domainname), pointing dns1 and dns2 directly to NPM's local IP address.