Today I’m trying to reduce the power consumption of my Proxmox Backup Server. The HP Microserver is great for what I need, but it’s kinda loud and I’m working on optimizing my power bill. The homelab is the largest single consumer of electricity aside from the air conditioning in the summer, so it’s something I’m looking at heavily. Anyway, I thought I could do this purely with systemd sleep / suspend initially.

You’ve probably heard all about creating multiple VLANs, for things like your IoT network, guest wifi, and more. But do you know what a VLAN actually is, and what the difference is between a VLAN and a Subnet? Today I’m going to cover the numbering of subnets in your network, and how to set up new subnet and VLAN interfaces in OPNsense. Come along on this adventure! Contents Video Subnetes VLANs Video Subnets Starting in the last video, we have a basic network setup with the internet (green cable) and a ‘LAN’ made up of only my laptop (black and yellow cable).

In this project, I explore an all-in-one home server using low cost hardware, bringing together as many common home applications as possible in a single box. Terramaster NAS as low-cost Proxmox node? Teardown and SW Install! In the first video, I introduce the hardware for this project - a cheap Terramaster NAS! It combines two HDD bays and two NVMe slots in a very tiny and low power brick, with dual 2.

I’ve been using Mikrotik RouterOS for awhile now, both using their hardware and their virtual image (Cloud Hosted Router). It’s a great product for routing and firewalling, while it’s not a NGFW it’s an absolutely amazing router and their L2/L3 switches are also a great value for the price. So anyway, I often setup images of the latest CHR in Proxmox VE for testing things. I create vmbr bridges in Proxmox to point-to-point link multiple CHRs, and can lab out complex network setups.

When you’re troubleshooting network issues, it’s often extremely helpful to view and analyze packet captures. The de-facto tool for this is the open-source Wireshark, which has an extensive protocol decoding capability. So, as a Proxmox user, it would be nice to be able to analyze VM networking issues using Wireshark. Unfortunately for us, Wireshark is a graphical application and Proxmox’s web UI doesn’t support it. However, we can use the command-line tool tcpdump to create a pcap file, and then analyze that file in Wireshark.

So Linux has adopted Persistent Device Naming, which is a really great thing for most systems. Unlike the old days where we just had eth0 and eth1 and eth2 etc (which at least has no spaces unlike Local Area Connection 6 that another OS uses), whose order depended on driver initialization in the kernel. Most people just had eth0 and were happy, and most people will still just have one Ethernet interface and will still be happy.

Today I’m taking my 10 servers and hopefully working that list down to just 7! JUST SEVEN! So, driven by my desire to consolidate my critical services into one box so I can lab away with the rest of the boxes, I am taking the time to shut down some of the most critical servers in the house and re-home them, then disassemble the parts for the next project. Come along with me on this adventure!

A Discord member of mine came to me with an interesting problem - enbling the VLAN-aware bridge in Proxmox would cause all network traffic on the physical card to stop, entirely. Definitely a frustrating issue, especially since the kernel logs made no sense. The Problem Here’s what he sent from dmesg: [ 32.732509] mlx5_core 0000:19:00.1: mlx5e_vport_context_update_vlans:179:(pid 13470): netdev vlans list size (4080) > (512) max vport list size, some vlans will be dropped [ 32.

Contents Video Installation Configure HTTPS Self-Signed Configure HTTPS Let’s Encrypt Video Installation I’m using an LXC container in Proxmox running Debian 12. You’re free to use any other Debian 12 system, and the instructions should still work. It’s not particularly resource intensive, but you can monitor it to see if you need to increase the RAM/CPU allocations. I also added a second mount point to /var/lib/gitea, which is where all of the Gitea data will be stored.

I’ve been using Linode’s object hosting for my website for ~2 years now, and it’s time for a change. I’m not unhappy with Linode, but object hosting isn’t for me any more and I’d like to move up to a virtual private server. Object hosting is a fantastic way to get started with a static website for a low cost, but I want better backend analytics and more control of the whole process, so I’m setting up my own VPS using Caddy.