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Instructionals/Technical Articles on Proxmox and Cron Jobs
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HowTo Geek ☛ 5 weird but handy cron jobs I swear by
Cron jobs are usually considered to be boring automation for backups, log rotation, and cleanup. I firmly believe that undersells what they are capable of, as with a little creativity, cron can easily become one of the most personal and surprisingly fun parts of your system. They are weird, practical, and just geeky enough to make your homelab and daily workflow feel alive instead of invisible.
Command Typo Tracker
No matter how big a geek you are, everyone mistypes commands, and that’s okay (not always, but you get it.) The real problem is that we forget those typos and keep repeating them. To solve this problem, this cron job watches your shell history, tracks failed commands, and builds a personal hall of shame you can review once per week.
After a few days, you will start to notice certain patterns. Maybe you constantly swap flags, mistype long paths, or forget which tool you meant to use. Once you see those mistakes written down and served in the hall of shame list, you can go back and review them or use simple aliases (yeah, that’s lazy!)
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XDA ☛ I customized my Proxmox node so much that updates became terrifying
Between its terrific virtualization performance, LXC (and now OCI images) support, and clustering tools, there are plenty of reasons why I adore Proxmox. However, Proxmox’s thriving community might just be my favorite aspect of the king of virtualization platforms. Aside from the massive documentation and helpful forum posts, the talented developers in the Proxmox community have designed several unique tools that add some much-needed features to my PVE nodes. Not to mention, with Proxmox essentially being built on Debian, it’s possible to arm a PVE instance with conventional Linux packages.
Unfortunately, installing these packages breaks an unspoken rule of the home lab faction. You know, the one about never modifying the host server. While I still believe that some third-party services deserve a place in my Proxmox workstations, I have to admit that there’s a lot of truth to this tenet.
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XDA ☛ You can make any OS immutable with Proxmox, here's how I did it
I'm a sucker for a new distro to load up and play with, along with the dozens I've already tried. Then I discovered Proxmox, and my distro-hopping got to new heights. I mean, I can spin up dozens of VMs on the server I run Proxmox on, and then I'm not overwriting the same poor old laptop that was being used to fuel my habit.
Then I learned about immutable operating systems, and had to try them out. I mean, the promise of not being able to "break" your install to the point of failure is intoxicating, but it didn't quite live up to my expectations. I don't like flatpaks; I like being able to edit system files to fix issues or tweak things to my liking, and the whole thing was doomed.
But then I stumbled upon a nugget of wisdom that said I could make any of my Proxmox VMs immutable with a simple configuration variable, and the invasive thoughts started again. Would I like immutable systems if I could flick a switch, make the changes I wanted, and then make it immutable again? It turns out I do, but I found a bunch of other use cases I'd not considered, and now I can't live without them.