I heard shutting down a Ceph cluster is not just a matter of running poweroff on each node. I'm gonna have an electrician at home soon who proposed a 2 days power cut. Which means my HomeLab will be off for some time - no OPNsense FW, no DNS, no Jellyfin etc. I've found several instructions on the Proxmox forum as as well as on personal blogs on line, however, I wanted to reach out to the community to clarify the procedure and pick your brains so you speak and gain from your experiences. Anyone feedback on this topic will be much appreciated. This is what I basically found: Shutdown procedure 0. Disable HA 1. Stop the client VM and container from using your cluster 2. Issue the command ceph -s and verify that the cluster is HEALTH_OK status 3. ceph osd set noout 4. ceph osd set nobackfill 5. ceph osd set norecover 6. On each node: systemctl stop ceph.target 7. poweroff Bring the cluster back up Once the cluster has been powered up, the OSD flags that were set to protect the cluster from itself while it is being powered down and back up again must be unset in reverse order: 1. ceph osd unset norecover 2. ceph osd unset nobackfill 3. ceph osd unset noout 4. re-enable HA 5. Start up desired client VM and LXC containers Sources: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#pveceph_shutdown https://vmorecloud.com/shutdown-proxmox-cluster-with-ceph-storage/ https://smithfarm-thebrain.blogspot.com/2020/09/how-to-shut-down-ceph-cluster.html

The 8 Hypervisors I'd Actually Recommend in Late 2026 #besthypervisors #virtualization #homelab https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2026/08/the-8-hypervisors-id-actually-recommend-in-late-2026/

Hello fellow homelabbers, After recently migrating my homelab DNS infrastructure from Pi-hole to a High-Availability Technitium DNS Cluster, I wanted to share my architecture, findings, and performance testing results with the community. When designing a homelab DNS setup, you face multiple implementation choices. Because I am running my two DNS instances on significantly different generations of hardware, finding the optimal configuration required some real-world benchmarking.The Hardware & Topology. My Proxmox environment utilizes two distinct physical hosts:Lenovo ThinkStation P520 – Running an Intel Xeon W-2135 CPU (released in 2017).Aoostar WTR Pro Max – Running an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU (released in 2024).The 2024 Ryzen CPU is substantially more powerful than the 2017 Xeon. To optimize performance based on this hardware asymmetry, I configured my router's DHCP scope to lease the Aoostar instance (192.168.11.51) as the Primary DNS server, and the Lenovo instance (192.168.11.50) as the Secondary DNS server. This ensures the bulk of the network load is handled by the faster CPU, while the older hardware stands by as a seamless failover node. Both servers stay perfectly synchronized using the built-in Technitium Cluster Sync application. The Architecture: Solving the Encryption vs. Autonomy Paradox.My goal was absolute privacy inside my network, combined with complete independence from upstream public DNS providers (like Cloudflare, Google, or Quad9). Achieving this requires balancing two distinct traffic directions:Inbound (Client to Homelab): DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH)To secure local network traffic, I deployed Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) inside my Docker environment. NPM handles the incoming HTTPS connections on port 443 using a valid Let's Encrypt Wildcard Certificate. To prevent complex Nginx database and SSL handshake issues (ERR_SSL_UNRECOGNIZED_NAME_ALERT), I kept NPM clean. I created two straightforward Proxy Hosts (dns1.patad.nl and dns2.patad.nl) that route traffic on the backend directly to the Technitium LXC containers on a custom DNS-over-HTTP port (8053).To make this accessible locally without routing traffic out to the internet, I configured a Split-Horizon DNS zone within Technitium for (my domainname), pointing dns1 and dns2 directly to NPM's local IP address.

The More I Learn, the Simpler My Home Lab Becomes #homelab #homeserver #learning #learneveryday https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2026/07/the-more-i-learn-the-simpler-my-home-lab-becomes/

Why I Never Bought Into the Home Lab Dashboard Trend #homelab #homelabdashboard #selfhosting https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2026/06/why-i-never-bought-into-the-home-lab-dashboard-trend/