Homelab / Self-hosting

Practical guides for building and operating homelabs with Proxmox, containers, virtualization, storage, backups, monitoring, and self-hosted services. The focus is reliable infrastructure, clear trade-offs, and systems that remain maintainable as they grow.

A refined homelab scene showing VM nodes resolving local names through a Pi-hole layer and recursive upstream queries through Unbound.

Nov 3, 2026H.W. Crestwood

Setting Up Local DNS Resolution for VMs with Pi-hole and Unbound

A central proxy node in a refined homelab environment distributing web traffic toward multiple lightweight web containers.

Oct 25, 2026H.W. Crestwood

HAProxy on Proxmox: Load Balancing Traffic Across Multiple Web Containers

A refined media-server scene showing a self-hosted photo platform receiving photos and videos from both a cloud source and mobile devices.

Oct 22, 2026H.W. Crestwood

Immich Setup and Migration: Replacing Google Photos with a Self-Hosted Media Server

A refined homelab scene showing two different identity-security paths protecting a group of self-hosted applications behind one access layer.

Oct 20, 2026H.W. Crestwood

Authentik vs Authelia: Adding Single Sign-On (SSO) and 2FA to Self-Hosted Apps

A bright editorial homelab scene showing several storage HBA cards arranged from older SAS models to newer high-density tri-mode adapters.

Oct 18, 2026H.W. Crestwood

Top 5 PCIe Expansion Cards for Homelabs: HBAs

A refined homelab scene showing a lightweight container host creating one outbound encrypted path to a secure edge while internal services remain protected behind local boundaries.

Oct 11, 2026H.W. Crestwood

Cloudflare Tunnel in LXC: Secure Remote Access Without Opening Ports

A refined virtualization and networking scene showing one isolated exposed-services zone separated from trusted internal infrastructure by controlled firewall boundaries.

Oct 10, 2026H.W. Crestwood

Configure a Virtual Isolated DMZ Network in Proxmox for Exposed Services

A layered homelab security illustration showing an outer hypervisor firewall boundary and inner software firewall protection inside virtual machines.

Oct 6, 2026H.W. Crestwood

Configure Software Firewalls inside VMs: UFW / iptables vs Proxmox Firewall

A bright editorial homelab scene showing an NVMe drive being handed directly into a storage virtual machine.

Oct 2, 2026H.W. Crestwood

PCI Passthrough for NVMe Drives: Direct Storage Access for Storage VMs

A refined homelab scene centered on an organized infrastructure map that groups servers, virtual machines, and IP address blocks into one source of truth.

Sep 24, 2026H.W. Crestwood

Configure NetBox in a Homelab: Documenting IP Addresses