Just an Aussie tech guy - home automation, ESP gadgets, networking. Also love my camping and 4WDing.

Be a good motherfucker. Peace.

  • 4 Posts
  • 243 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • It all depends on how you want to homelab.

    I was into low power homelabbing for a while - half a dozen Raspberry Pis - and it was great. But I’m an incessant tinkerer. I like to experiment with new tech all the time, and am always cloning various repos to try out new stuff. I was reaching a limit with how much I could achieve with just Docker alone, and I really wanted to virtualise my firewall/router. There were other drivers too. I wanted to cut the streaming cord, and saving that monthly spend helped justify what came next.

    I bought a pair of ex enterprise servers (HP DL360s) and jumped into Proxmox. I now have an OPNsense VM for my firewall/router, and host over 40 Proxmox CTs, running (at a guess) around 60-70 different services across them.

    I love it, because Proxmox gives me full separation of each service. Each one has its own CT. Think of that as me running dozens of Raspberry Pis, without the headache of managing all that hardware. On top of that, Docker gives me complete portability and recoverability. I can move services around quite easily, and can update/rollback with ease.

    Finally, the combination of the two gives me a huge advantage over bare metal for rapid prototyping.

    Let’s say there’s a new contender that competes with Immich. They offer the promise of a really cool feature no one else has thought of in a self-hosted personal photo library. I have Immich hosted on a CT, using Docker, and hiding behind Nginx Proxy Manager (also on a CT), accessible via photos.domain on my home network.

    I can spin up a Proxmox CT from my custom Debian template, use my Ansible playbook to provision Docker and all the other bits, access it in Portainer and spin up the latest and greatest Immich competitor, all within mere minutes. Like, literally 10 minutes max.

    I have a play with the competitor for a bit. If I don’t like it, I just delete the CT and move on. If I do, I can point my photos.domain hostname (via Nginx Proxy Manager) to the new service and start using it full-time. Importantly, I can still keep my original Immich CT in place - maybe shutdown, maybe not - just in case I discover something I don’t like about the new kid on the block.

    That’s a simplified example, but hopefully illustrates at least what I get out of using Proxmox the way I do.

    The cons for me is the cost. Initial cost of hardware, and the cost of powering beefier kit like this. I’m about to invest in some decent centralised storage (been surviving with a couple li’l ARM-based NASes) to I can get true HA with my OPNsense firewall (and a few other services), so that’s more cost again.


  • Jimmy Diresta. I’m a huge fan of makers, and the maker movement in general, and there was a time I just couldn’t wait for Jimmy’s next video.

    Lately, I’ve come to feel that he no longer lets his work speak for itself. His videos used to just be really well made time lapses of him making a thing. But, for the past couple of years now, he feels the need to narrate just about everything. And there’s the faintest whiff of semi-arrogant self promotion about it, which just puts me off every time.

    Don’t get me wrong. Talking through the making process is 100% OK with me. I watch plenty of makers that talk through their videos (Pask Makes, Wesley Treat, etc) but something has changed in Jimmy’s style, and I just don’t like him any more.

    Shame. Arguably, Jimmy is the one that (re)ignited the movement’s popularity on the internet, but it just kinda feels he’s let it go to his head somehow.








  • Have seen both sides of the fence on this.

    Met my first wife when I was in my 20s, she was a bit older, already divorced with kids. We were together for over 10 years, and one of her sons lived with us off and on during his teenage years. We enjoyed all the benefits of a childless existence - disposable income, freedom to do whatever we wanted evenings/weekends, etc, etc.

    Eventually our marriage broke down. The reasons for it are entirely unrelated to us not having kids, but we were definitely not destined to be together for the rest of our lives.

    About a year or so later I met an incredible woman, and I truly learned what it meant to have a soulmate. We were awesome together. She already had two young kids - 6yo and 9yo - and, a year or so later again, we had our own baby girl. We married a couple of years after that.

    We now have a family that includes an amazing 21yo woman, a fabulous 18yo fella, and a beautiful 10yo daughter. My life is complete and I can’t imagine it without any of them in it.

    When you know, you know.