Posts

Why I like LXC over VM for my homeserver As I said the other day Proxmox is a godsend for casual home server. Its free, its robust, it has everything that a casual home server admin needs. Now Proxmox gives you two distinct ways to run your services: full-blown Virtual Machines (VMs) and Linux Containers (LXCs). When I first set up my proxmox node off of an old mini PC with an Intel n5105 and 8GB RAM, I naturally defaulted to VMs for everything, mostly because that is what I knew from my times of administering VMware esxi and Windows Hyperv. It was straight forward, download a Ubuntu Server ISO, click through the installer, give it 2GB of RAM (my server had only 8gb ram, this is the most I could afford for each vm), and repeat. But after deploying up my 4th VM just to run basic stuff like Pi-hole, Bookstack, and Plex, my server started fighting for its life. ...

“The internet is down, Is it really?” Whenever some one says Internet is down, majority of time, the internet is perfectly fine. What the user actually means is that the incredibly complex multi stage process that is required to load a web page has broken at one specific stage. Browsers are actually great at telling you exact what stage the issue has happened. But because most people just don’t see what they were expecting, they assume the entire network has collapsed. ...

When testing quick simple application, full hardware virtualization is often overkill. I heavily rely on Proxmox VE, but spinning up unprivileged Linux Containers (LXC) is where you get real problem. You have to nail down the UID/GID mapping early, especially if you are bind-mounting external storage or else you will face endless permission errors. I am still getting a hang of thie uid/gid mapping. Will add more once I have more confidence on it.

I have been selfhosting from last 15 years, started with a tiny Raspberry pi running Kodi as media server, after that my “home server” was an old laptop with broker screen running standard Ubuntu with applications installed directly on the OS, it was a mess of configuration files I was scared to touch when everything was running fine. Every update would break some or other thing, If an update broke networking or a disk filled up unexpectedly, my entire setup like Plex, Pihole stops working and if pihole stops working there is no DNS so it breaks internet for everything at home. Then came hours of troubleshooting, Googling (No AI then), A single weekend project often turned into an unplanned six-hour rebuild from scratch. ...