Tag: homelab

Edit 4K (or chunky 1080p60) on a mini PC without the timeline turning into a slideshow. Kdenlive proxies plus VAAPI/NVENC for cheap homelab editing.

Cosmos, CasaOS, and Umbrel each try to make self-hosting one-click. Here's how they actually compare on UI, security, app catalogs, and the all-important escape hatch when you outgrow them.

Set up Snapper on Btrfs to auto-snapshot before every system update, roll back broken machines in minutes, and never lose a working root filesystem again.

Plex tripled the lifetime price to $749. Here's a decision tree plus a working Jellyfin migration plan: Docker, transcoding, clients, watch history.

Stop letting every machine write directly to S3. Kopia repository server gives you shared dedup, per-host auth, and sane maintenance, all in one place.

Pipe ZFS incremental snapshots through WireGuard to a friend's NAS or a remote VPS. Encrypted in transit and at rest, no rsync.net bill or vendor lock-in.

Restic forget, prune, and check: right order, real retention flags, cron automation, and why --read-data on a large repo will ruin your whole weekend.

Skip the paid Unraid license. mergerfs + SnapRAID give you flexible JBOD pooling with parity protection on mismatched drives you already own, for free.

Run a real S3-compatible object storage cluster on Raspberry Pi 4s with SeaweedFS, low RAM overhead, fast filer, no Ceph drama or surprise cloud bills.

Bind mounts are fast and simple; NFS is shared and flexible for containers. Pick wrong and your database corrupts at 2 AM. Here is how to choose wisely.

Bcachefs got booted from the Linux mainline kernel and now ships as a DKMS module. Stability verdict, tiering, and a straight answer for home lab use in 2026.

GPU passthrough on Proxmox is the best way to isolate LLM workloads, but it's a minefield of IOMMU groups, vfio-pci binding, and Code 43 errors. This post walks through the whole thing end-to-end.