Linux on The Home Lab

ZFS for Homelabbers: Pools, Datasets, and Snapshots

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Makes ZFS Different?

ZFS is not just a filesystem — it’s a combined volume manager and filesystem. Everything from disk management to RAID to snapshots to checksumming is handled in one stack. This matters because:

Every block is checksummed. Silent data corruption (bit rot) is detected and, with redundancy, automatically corrected.
Snapshots are instant and cheap. A snapshot is just a pointer — it consumes no space until you delete data that the snapshot still references.
Copy-on-write semantics. Writes never overwrite existing data. Torn writes (partial writes during power failure) cannot corrupt the filesystem.
Compression is transparent. Enable it on a dataset and the CPU handles compression/decompression invisibly.

ZFS does not protect against drive failure any better than hardware RAID — it has the same RAIDZ fault tolerance. What it protects against is silent corruption, which hardware RAID controllers can silently propagate.

Installing Proxmox VE

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What is Proxmox VE?

Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) is a free, open-source hypervisor built on Debian. It supports both KVM-based virtual machines and LXC containers, and comes with a decent web UI out of the box — no need to pay for a VMware licence.

Hardware

For this build I’m running Proxmox on two nodes:

Node	CPU	RAM	Storage
pve-01	Intel Core i5-12400	32 GB DDR4	500 GB NVMe (OS) + 2 TB SSD (VMs)
pve-02	Intel Core i5-10400	16 GB DDR4	256 GB NVMe (OS) + 1 TB SSD (VMs)

Downloading the ISO

Head to the Proxmox downloads page and grab the latest Proxmox VE ISO Installer. At the time of writing that was 8.x.

Self-Hosted VPN with WireGuard

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Why Self-Host a VPN?

A self-hosted VPN gives you a secure tunnel back into your home network when you’re away. Unlike commercial VPN services (which are for hiding traffic from your ISP), this is about remote access — connecting to your NAS, home automation, internal dashboards, or development environment from a coffee shop or hotel.

WireGuard is the right choice today. It’s built into the Linux kernel, uses modern cryptography (ChaCha20, Curve25519), and has a drastically smaller codebase than OpenVPN (~4,000 lines vs ~400,000). Handshakes complete in milliseconds. Battery drain on mobile is noticeably lower.