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Homelab really took off for me when Raspberry pi became available. I was able to play with a 3B board which came with 1 gig ram and 1 CPU. It was a great low power system. I have to admit I was a little lost when I tried using the raspian default OS. It was more “linux” that I was making the most basic things seem like a burden. One day I heard about a super slim OS that had a menu of installable packages. This was perfect. It is a Debian branch which means I can follow along with most online tutorials and use the same commands.

I think my favourite features are

1. the drive manager that has a little setup wizard to aid in enlarging the boot disk, adding more storage or mounting a gifs or nfs storage. It adds the correct information to ftab file which was always something I had to google.
2. The Os config menu. making it super easy to set time zone, computer name, Static network IP and Custom DNS.
3. software library, especially for docker, docker-compose, Portainer. I used to install software directly onto the raspberry pi using the software menu but the lack of containerization bit me once too often. Now I almost solely use docker.

As I have moved to Proxmox, I have create a vm template of a dietpi OS via a cools script I found here: https://github.com/dazeb/proxmox-dietpi-installer

I even tried making my own diet-LXC container from here: https://dietpi.com/blog/?p=2642 . It worked but it seems to me if you are going the way of LXC you might as well stick to purpose built containers from: https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts

I am an old school nerd who has had a homelab before it was cool. One of my first experiments was building a sendmail server on an old laptop using only the command line interface -cli so I could get into how linux worked. A lot has changed in 25 years since that first exercise. I spend a few years working off raspberry pi platform learning hosting and dabbling in docker.

As of late I have been interested in clustering and that involved too many steps /physical steps the experimenting on pis so I took the big leap and shifted to Proxmox and have not looked back.

The aim of this site is to jot down some notes as I experiment resulting in hosting my own stuff and using what I host.

As of Jan 1, 2025 I am building out a docker swarm on Proxmox involving 3 masters and 2 workers. I hope to be adding content over the year….let’s see how it goes.