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Recent Proxmox and TrueNAS Articles
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XDA ☛ Most Proxmox setups fail the same way, and you won’t know until it's too late
Proxmox has a way of making a home lab feel more professional than it really is. You get a clean web interface, neatly named VMs, tidy storage views, and enough knobs to convince yourself the whole thing is under control. That confidence is useful because it keeps you building instead of second-guessing every decision. It can also hide some very ordinary mistakes until the day something breaks loudly.
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XDA ☛ The best NAS distro is getting better at virtualization, but you shouldn’t use it exclusively for that
TrueNAS has been my go-to platform for storage servers ever since its Core days, and the Community Edition (or Scale, as we used to call it back in the day) has been a massive improvement over its FreeBSD predecessor. And between WebShare and NVMe-over-TCP, ixSystems has added a bunch of cool features in the last couple of updates.
My favorites are the enhanced virtualization provisions and LXC support, which essentially turn the king of ZFS NAS distributions into something more viable for general-purpose home server projects. But after checking out forum posts about tinkerers moving their DIY experiments to TrueNAS, I wouldn’t recommend using it to replace your LXC and VM-hosting workstations – especially if you’re already a member of the Proxmox faction like yours truly
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XDA ☛ I kept waiting for Docker to fail, but nineteen containers on bare metal proved Proxmox wrong
Most people and guides on the internet will suggest that aspiring home lab enthusiasts install Proxmox as the foundation. Whether it’s a Reddit post, YouTube video, or tech forum discussion, the advice is usually the same: gather hardware, install a hypervisor, separate everything into virtual machines, and start building an enterprise-grade infrastructure from day one. After going through most of the online guides, I also expected that I would eventually end up there.
The funny thing is, today, almost a year later, my homelab is running on a bare-metal Debian server, and all services are on Docker. It hosts everything from Jellyfin and Immich to Vaultwarden and Pi-hole on a modest i5 machine. What started as a temporary phase due to hardware constraints, which I assumed, now has become a proof of concept that a bare-metal Docker setup could handle a full homelab environment.
At some point, I realized Docker was already enough for the way I used my homelab, and I didn’t actually need a hypervisor.
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XDA ☛ This hidden Proxmox setting may sound cursed, but it’s really useful for coding and DIY projects
Having spent a long time with Proxmox, I’ve run into all sorts of obscure settings and performance tweaks – some acquired from random forum posts; others unearthed from issue threads on random Proxmox-centric GitHub packages. But the real gold mines were the seemingly cursed settings that, despite sounding unhinged, actually come with niche benefits, and in some cases, can be game-changers for your specific workloads.
Nested virtualization fits in the latter category, and while it’s fairly easy to set up, it’s not very popular in the PVE community. For the uninitiated, it’s the arcane art of running virtual machines inside other VMs, and while it has some massive deal-breakers, it completely changed how I worked on my coding projects.