rHomelab

Every data hoarder eventually hits the same wall: the motherboard only has six SATA ports, and the build calls for twelve drives. The instinctive fix is a cheap RAID card off eBay, and that instinct is almost always wrong. The actual answer, in nearly every homelab storage build, is an HBA flashed to IT mode. Here’s what that means, why it matters, and how to do it without turning a $40 card into a paperweight. ...

Buying the right GPU for your homelab is one decision. Getting Proxmox to actually hand that GPU to a VM or container is a separate one, and it’s where a lot of people get stuck, because Proxmox actually supports two completely different ways to do it, and picking the wrong one for the job means either a fight with IOMMU groups you didn’t need to have, or a container that can’t do what you needed a full GPU for. Here’s what each path actually requires, and how to pick between them. ...

Google Photos used to be the easy answer: unlimited storage, decent search, an app that just worked. That deal is gone, storage now counts against your Google One quota, prices have crept up, and the underlying trade was always the same one every free cloud photo service makes: your entire photo library, including the ones you’d rather not have scanned by an ad-tech company’s ML pipeline, lives on someone else’s servers under someone else’s terms. Immich and PhotoPrism are the two projects that have actually closed the gap between “self-hosted” and “something you’d trust with 15 years of family photos.” Picking between them comes down to a few real differences, not just which one has a nicer logo. ...

Shucking, buying an external USB hard drive purely to crack it open and pull out the bare drive inside, has been a data hoarder rite of passage for over a decade. Drive manufacturers have spent that whole decade trying to make it less appealing, and yet it keeps coming back every time there’s a good external-drive sale. Here’s whether it still makes sense, and what you’re actually signing up for when you do it. ...

RAM is one of the easiest specs to either badly underbuy or badly overbuy in a homelab, because the honest answer to “how much do I need” is “it depends on what you’re actually running,” and most buying guides dodge that and just tell you to get 32GB or 64GB and move on. That’s not wrong exactly, but it skips the reasoning that lets you size correctly for your own setup instead of someone else’s. Here’s how to actually work it out, plus the ECC question that comes up right behind it. ...

Proxmox makes joining a second node to a cluster look almost too easy, one command on the joining node and you’re done, centralized management across both boxes in the web UI. What that quick setup doesn’t make obvious is how much more you need to build on top of it before a cluster gives you the thing most people actually want from one: automatic failover when a node dies. This is the gap that catches people, they cluster two or three nodes, assume they now have redundancy, and find out during an actual outage that a VM doesn’t restart anywhere because nothing was wired up to make that happen. Here’s what clustering actually gets you, what it costs, and an honest read on whether it’s worth doing in a home setup versus running solid standalone nodes. ...

Browser extensions block ads on the device they’re installed on. A phone that isn’t running one, a smart TV, a game console, a guest’s laptop on your Wi-Fi, none of that gets covered. Network-level DNS blocking fixes that by sitting between every device on your network and the internet, and refusing to resolve requests to known ad and tracker domains before they ever load. It’s one of the easiest wins in self-hosting: low resource cost, immediate and visible results, and it protects every device on the network without touching a single one of them individually. Pi-hole and AdGuard Home are the two dominant tools for doing this yourself, and picking between them comes down to a handful of real differences, not just branding. ...

Every data hoarder eventually runs into the same uncomfortable fact: a hard drive can report a read as fully successful while quietly handing back the wrong bits. No error, no SMART warning, no crash. The file opens fine. It’s just wrong. That’s bit rot, and RAID redundancy alone does nothing to catch it, because RAID is built to survive a drive failing outright, not a drive lying to you about data it’s still perfectly willing to serve. ...

“Do I need a GPU for this” comes up constantly in homelab planning, usually attached to one of two very different goals: hardware-accelerated transcoding for Plex or Jellyfin, or running local AI workloads like Ollama or Stable Diffusion. Those two goals point at completely different hardware, and buying for one when you actually need the other is one of the more common expensive mistakes in this hobby. Here’s how to figure out which category you’re actually in before you spend anything. ...

Proxmox sets up a single bridge during install, vmbr0, hands every VM and container a virtual NIC on it, and most homelabs never touch networking again after that. That’s fine right up until you want to keep your NAS traffic off the same broadcast domain as a VM you don’t fully trust, or you add a second NIC and aren’t sure whether to bond it or split it out, or you’re staring at a VLAN dropdown in the VM hardware tab with no idea what happens if you fill it in wrong. None of this is complicated once you see the shape of it, but Proxmox’s networking config is also one of the few places where a bad change locks you out of the box that’s hosting the config, so it’s worth understanding before you’re mid-edit over SSH. ...