just running my old desktop PC with proxmox. most important thing for my homelab i ever did was starting to mess around with VMs. first with virt-manager to ha

just running my old desktop PC with proxmox. most important thing for my homelab i ever did was starting to mess around with VMs. first with virt-manager to have a gui, then just plain kvm (actually probably qemu) on the commandline using scripts to auto-install vms, and now a combination of Proxmox and Ansible to make a vm with just a few keystrokes. The freedom of messing around as much as i want without danger of breaking my system is the best. next most important was setting up dns and dhcp automation - whenever the ansible playbook makes a vm, it immediately reserves a static ip for that mac and makes a DNS entry for that vm's name pointing to it's ip - so i can easily reach all my vm's by name without having to go through the effort of setting that up. great for when a test vm becomes permanent and needs to be accessible. this combined with using ansible to automatically create my user and put my ssh pubkey into it's authorized-hosts file makes everything SO smooth, no friction at all to work on different vm's and experiment. also, when the ssd proxmox was installed on died, it was super easy to restore all the vm's. next step is probably automating public dns, port forwarding and reverse proxy settings - so far i am doing that manually, but i just got a new phone and refuse to log into google on it, so i've had to set up a bunch of services, kinda running my own cloud, and they all need port forwards and reverse proxy entries. speaking of reverse proxy... it's a wonderful tool, set up ssl/https ONCE on it and use certbot to manage certs in one place, and you can test any service by just forwarding it to the vm without ssl, no hassle. for critical things i guess i'd still recommend setting up ssl for your internal network too, defense in depth like.