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Intro
 In my homelab, updates are one of those things that are easy to postpone. 
 Not because they are complicated, but because they are manual. I need to connect to the right system, check the state, apply the updates, reboot if needed, verify that everything comes back correctly, and then repeat the same process for the next component. 
 And because it is manual, I usually keep it…
Intro
 My homelab network is handled by an OPNsense cluster composed of two VM nodes. Both of these VMs are running inside my Proxmox VE cluster. You can find details in this article . 
 This setup works fine most of the time. The issue is more about the rare cases where the Proxmox cluster itself is down. When that happens, both OPNsense nodes are unavailable at the same time, which means…
Introduction
 In my homelab, I need a place to store data outside of my Proxmox VE cluster. 
 At the beginning, my single physical server has 2 HDDs disks of 2 TB. When I installed Proxmox on it, those disks stayed attached to the host. I shared them via an NFS server in an LXC, far from best practice. 
 This winter, the node started to fail, shutting down for no reason. This buddy is…
Intro
 In my homelab, I like to play with tools like Ansible and Terraform. The primary interface is the CLI, which I love, but sometimes a fancy web UI is just nice. 
 After setting up my OPNsense cluster, I wanted a way to keep it up to date on a schedule. Automation means Ansible to me, but how do you automate and schedule playbooks? 
 At work I use Red Hat Ansible Automation…
Intro
 In this post, I am not going to explain best practices for deploying applications. Instead, I want to document how I am currently deploying new applications in my homelab. 
 Think of this article as a snapshot in time. This is how things really work today, knowing that in the near future I would like to move toward a more GitOps-oriented workflow. 
 The method I use is fairly…
Intro
 This is the final stage of my OPNsense virtualization journey. 
 A few months ago, my physical OPNsense box crashed because of a hardware failure. This leads my home in the dark, literally. No network, no lights. 
 💡 To avoid being in that situation again, I imagined a plan to virtualize my OPNsense firewall into my Proxmox VE cluster. The last time, I’ve set up a proof…
Intro
 My Proxmox VE cluster is almost one year old now, and I haven’t kept the nodes fully up to date. Time to address this and bump it to Proxmox VE 9 . 
 I’m mainly after the new HA affinity rules, but here the useful changes that this version brings: 
 
 Debian 13 “Trixie”. 
 Snapshots for thick-provisioned LVM shared storage. 
 SDN fabrics feature.…
Intro
 In my previous article I set up a PoC to validate building a cluster of two OPNsense VMs in Proxmox VE to make the firewall highly available. 
 Now I’m preparing to make that real in my homelab, this post documents my real OPNsense cluster configuration, from fresh installs to HA, DNS, DHCP, VPN and reverse proxy. 
 Context
 Before diving into the OPNsense…
Intro
 I recently encountered my first real problem, my physical OPNsense box crashed because of a kernel panic, I’ve detailed what happened in that post . 
 That failure made me rethink my setup. A unique firewall is a single point of failure, so to improve resilience I decided to take a new approach: virtualize OPNsense . 
 Of course, just running one VM wouldn’t be enough. To…
Intro
 When I first built my Proxmox VE 8 cluster, networking wasn’t my main concern. I just wanted to replace an old physical server quickly, so I gave each of my three nodes the same basic config, created the cluster, and started running VMs:
 
 That worked fine for a while. But as I plan to virtualize my OPNsense router, I need something more structured and consistent. This is where…
Intro
 This week, I experienced my first real problem on my homelab, which caused my whole home network to go down. 
 My OPNsense router crashed and, after several failed recovery attempts, I finally had to reinstall it from scratch. Luckily, almost all of the configuration came back thanks to a single XML file. In that story, I will tell you what happened, what I did to recover and what I…
Intro
 After building my own Kubernetes cluster in my homelab using kubeadm in that post , my next challenge is to expose a simple pod externally, reachable with an URL and secured with a TLS certificate verified by Let’s Encrypt. 
 To achieve this, I needed to configure several components: 
 
 Service : Expose the pod inside the cluster and provide an access point. 
…
Intro
 In this previous article , I explained how to deploy VMs using a Terraform module with Proxmox and ended up with 6 VMs, 3 masters and 3 workers nodes, based on cloud-init template . 
 Now that the infrastructure is ready, let’s move on to the next step: manually building a Kubernetes cluster in my homelab using kubeadm , highly available using stacked etcd . 
 In this post, I’ll…
Intro
 In a previous post , I explained how to deploy Virtual Machines on Proxmox using Terraform , building from a cloud-init template . 
 In this post, we’ll take that code and turn it into a reusable Terraform module . Then, I’ll show how to use that module in other projects to simplify and scale your infrastructure deployments. 
 
 What is a Terraform Module?
 Terraform…
Intro
 In my apartment I have a Daikin air conditioning system, to cool it down in summer, but also warm it up in winter. It is composed of 3 indoor units: 
 
 Living room 
 Master bedroom 
 Hallway (in front of my office and my kid’s room) 
 
 I always find it boring to have to turn them on when I needed, I forgot to turn them off when I should and I was…
Intro
 To know what is going on in my homelab and be warned when something fails, I want to setup a notification system where almost anything could seamlessly send me a message that I would receive on my mobile. 
 In the past I was using Pushover , which was great, but I want to explore new options, more modern and eventually self-hosted. 
 Choose the Right Notification System
 The…
Intro
 Now that my blog is live, I can’t really afford to break it with every single change. I did have a “preview” version of the blog that was generated alongside the public version, but it relied on the same content and only allowed me to view pages in draft mode. 
 Since the blog is automatically redeployed every time I modify content in Obsidian, as explained in this…
Intro
 One of the most satisfying parts of building a homelab is getting to apply production-grade tooling to a personal setup. I’ve been working on defining my entire infrastructure as code, and the first piece I tackled was VM deployment with Terraform on Proxmox . 
 In this article, I’ll walk you through creating a simple VM on Proxmox VE 8 using Terraform, based on a cloud-init…
💡 Intro
 I always wanted to share my own experiences to give others ideas or help them on their projects. 
 I’m constantly tinkering in my homelab, trying new tools and workflows. Instead of keeping all these experiments in private notes, I decided to create a blog where I can document and publish them easily. 
 I wanted the entire process to be automated, self-hosted, and…
Intro
 Creating a VM template in Proxmox using cloud-init can streamline VM deployments significantly. This post covers the step-by-step process to set up a cloud-init-enabled VM template using Ubuntu for Proxmox. 
 Proxmox supports cloud-init, a tool that allows the automatic configuration of virtual machines right after they are provisioned. This includes setting up networking, SSH keys,…
![](https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/automating-proxmox-update-ansible/"https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/automating-proxmox-update-ansible/images/semaphore-ntfy-homelab-variables.png")
![](https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/migrate-passive-opnsense-node-to-truenas/"https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/migrate-passive-opnsense-node-to-truenas/images/truenas-create-new-vlan-interface.png")
![](https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/create-nas-server-with-truenas/"https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/create-nas-server-with-truenas/images/truenas-iso-installation-splash.png")
![](https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/semaphore-ui-interface-ansible-terraform/"https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/semaphore-ui-interface-ansible-terraform/images/semaphore-login-page.png")
![](https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/migration-opnsense-proxmox-highly-available/"https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/migration-opnsense-proxmox-highly-available/images/unifi-add-vlan-for-wan.png")
![](https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/proxmox-cluster-upgrade-8-to-9-ceph/"https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/proxmox-cluster-upgrade-8-to-9-ceph/images/proxmox-ceph-version-upgrade.png")
![](https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/opnsense-ha-full-configuration/"https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/opnsense-ha-full-configuration/images/opnsense-assign-interfaces.png")
![](https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/opnsense-virtualization-highly-available/"https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/opnsense-virtualization-highly-available/images/homelan-current-physical-layout.png")
![](https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/proxmox-cluster-networking-sdn/"https://blog.vezpi.com/en/post/proxmox-cluster-networking-sdn/images/proxmox-node-network-configuration.png")