How “no open ports” turned into Cloudflare Tunnels on the Proxmox host, then Twingate for private access, and why the headless client experiment failed but the connector stayed.
The Plex Pass Journey: Why GPU Transcoding Changed Everything
CPU transcoding on Ryzen 5600 looked like garbage. Plex Remote Watch helped connectivity but not quality. GTX 1060 NVENC + Plex Pass = hardware transcoding. $5/mo vs three evenings of debugging. The math is embarrassing.
Boot Race: When Smart Node Beats Infra Node
Power outage. Smart Node boots in 30 seconds. Infra Node takes 3 minutes. Media stack crashes, Sonarr re-downloads “missing” episodes. The systemd oneshot that made Smart Node wait.
The *Arr Stack Rabbit Hole and the Hardlink Lie
How a friend’s casual mention of Sonarr dragged me into the *Arr rabbit hole, why hardlinks don’t work across NFS, and the copy+delete compromise I live with.
Why Proxmox Won (Over TrueNAS, Unraid, and Bare Metal Docker)
I evaluated TrueNAS, Unraid, OMV, and bare metal Docker. Proxmox won — not because it is perfect, but because every alternative had a dealbreaker for my specific constraints. Here is the decision matrix and the one architecture mistake I almost made.
My Two-Node Homelab Architecture Explained
One refurbished HP G3. One Frankenstein Ryzen build. 16 GB vs 32 GB RAM split. Proxmox on infra, bare-metal Debian on smart. Here is why the split exists, what broke, the network upgrade it forced, and why I’m still weighing TrueNAS SCALE.
Why I Built a Homelab Instead of Paying for Cloud Services
It started with a broken Synology. It ended with two servers, a ZFS pool, and a new vocabulary word: ‘homelab.’ Here’s how a simple NAS replacement turned into a rabbit hole I’m still falling down.