This is a personal blog focused on computer software and hardware. Most projects are implementing software and hardware for a homelab. What is a homelab? I would say a homelab could be a single computer or dozens of computers connected in a network. You can also integrate with computers in the Cloud.
Mostly I have written blog posts to show how to get started with certain tools to use in a Homelab. Once I created a post showing off tools to install on a fresh Windows 10 workstation but I have not used Windows as a workstation since changing jobs in 2022.
There are certain tools I use on my macOS workstation at my job and most of these are also available to use on my Debian desktop workstations also.
Kanboard is an open source software for managing projects. I am using it to track my homelab tasks and jot down ideas for later.
A kanban board is a tool that is used in agile software development. Using a tool like this can help practice for larger scale software projects.
In order to run the Kanboard server, I will be using a container inside of a virtual machine. In order to keep this post concise, please check out my previous post on docker if you are not familiar with the technology. I also have a post on setting up virtual machines and yet another post onsetting up a dedicated system to run virtual machines with proxmox.
In 2023 I have not done much in the homelab because I moved across my country. My plans for the future of the lab include lowering power consumption and simplifying infrastructure. The most notable event this year was the release of Debian 12. The Debian Linux distribution is now the operating system I am using on all of my machines including my laptop.
Proxmox continues to be a reliable backbone to my lab. I have upgraded to version 8 that uses Debian 12 and vm backups continue to restore on new hosts reliably. A lot of hardware failures this year:
My preferred text editor is vim because it is portable and highly customizable. Text editors can be used to edit configuration files on a system and write source files for scripts and programs. While you can run vim in a separate window in your operating system, it can also be run within a terminal emulator. You can even find the original version vi on most *nix systems that do not have any graphical interface. Learning vim will help make debugging systems that only have a terminal easier.
Previously, I had a post here with steps to install Dokuwiki with Docker. If you have a suitable Kubernetes platform, proceed. If you are not familiar with Kubernetes, see a post on the topic. I also have not been doing many homelab projects. Using Kubernetes to run and test apps has been a very stable experience and I haven’t needed to do much of anything to keep it running. Now I am going to move my Dokuwiki into Kubernetes.
In my homelab, Proxmox is the main operating system that I use for servers. It is Debian Linux with some extra packages related to virtual machines and managing virtual machines.
Proxmox 8 introduces Debian 12 bookworm release as the underlying Operating System. If you are already running Proxmox 7 then read on to see how to upgrade your system. If you are not using Proxmox, I recommend checking out a previous post that introduces Proxmox and how to install it.