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.
Author: Radu Dinca
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.