Homelab on Tom Meurs

Talos Linux Vendor Lock-In: Five Questions, Run on My Own Nodes

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0200

TL;DR I ran the five questions from my licence post on the OS under my own cluster. The licence holds. The Talos Linux vendor lock-in sits in two defaults that point at Sidero’s servers, the BSL code Sidero keeps adding around the MPL core, and a company Yardi has owned since 14 September.

Linux Is for Everyone: Why This Blog Now Welcomes Beginners Too

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:28:00 +0100

My neighbour is 70 years old. He’s used Windows his whole life. Last month he asked me: “Tom, I keep hearing about Linux. Is that something for me too?”

He’s not the first. Over the past year I’ve had the same question from friends, family and colleagues, each in their own shape. “I want to get off Windows, but where do I start?” “Is Linux hard?” “Can I still use my normal programs?” To me these are easy questions. I’ve been running Linux since SuSE 6.0, back when you picked your hardware by whether a Linux driver existed for it. If you’ve never seen a terminal, they’re not easy at all.

Backup Strategy for Your Homelab: The 3-2-1 Rule in Practice

Mon, 18 May 2026 19:30:00 +0100

TL;DR Three copies, two kinds of media, one of them offsite. Restic for files, Velero for the cluster, a Backblaze bucket for the offsite copy, and a restore test on a schedule. Mine costs about €5 a month, and the restore test is the part I still have to make myself do.

Picture the disk in your homelab dying tonight. Not corrupting, not throwing SMART warnings for a week first, just gone. The git server with every repo you care about, the password vault, fifteen years of family photos, the home automation that runs the house. All of it on a drive that’s decided it’s done.

Tailscale for Homelab: Secure Remote Access Without Port Forwarding

Sun, 10 May 2026 18:45:00 +0100

TL;DR Tailscale puts every device I own on one WireGuard mesh, so I reach the cluster in the closet from a coffee shop without a single port forwarded on the router. Subnet router, exit node, the Kubernetes operator, ACLs, and Headscale for the part I’d rather host myself, in that order.

My homelab cluster runs in a closet at home. I don’t. I work from coffee shops, from a client’s office, and now and then from a hotel with WiFi that seems to resent me. I still want my own machines while I’m out there.

K3s Cluster Setup on Refurbished Mini-PCs

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:12:00 +0100

TL;DR Three refurbished mini-PCs, K3s with embedded etcd, kube-vip for one API address that survives a dead node, then MetalLB, Traefik and Longhorn on top. About €450 in hardware and an afternoon. Below are the commands, in the order I ran them.

Three mini-PCs sit on a shelf in my house. Between them they run my GitLab, my monitoring stack, home automation, file sync, a password manager, and a pile of other things I’d rather not hand to someone else’s computer. The whole setup cost less than one month of the managed Kubernetes bill for the same thing, and I know what every layer does because I put it there.

NixOS as a Hypervisor: KVM and QEMU Can Do Everything

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:52:00 +0100

TL;DR KVM and QEMU are the engine inside Proxmox and most of the cloud you rent. On NixOS, with libvirt on top, that engine is one block of config, and live migration, memory ballooning, GPU passthrough, SR-IOV and CPU pinning are each a command or an XML snippet away. What Proxmox adds is the dashboard and the delegation, and I’m honest below about how much that’s worth.

Ask around how to run a “real” hypervisor at home and you get the same shortlist. VMware, Hyper-V, or at minimum Proxmox. Something with a web UI, a clustering tab and a marketing page full of enterprise features. The shortlist is so well worn that running VMs without one of those products feels like cutting corners. I don’t blame anyone for that. The marketing is good.

Arch vs NixOS as a Workstation: Professional and Personal Use

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:28:00 +0100

TL;DR I’ve run Arch and NixOS as my daily machine, and today it’s Arch on both desktops and NixOS on the servers. Arch’s reputation for breaking is mostly a missing snapshot. With btrfs, Snapper, dotfiles in git and a package list, a rollback takes 2 minutes and the fear of updates goes away. NixOS earns its learning curve when several machines have to stay identical, and on a server I wouldn’t run anything else.

The Hardware Ownership Paradox: When Sovereignty Gets Expensive

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0100

In my previous post about self-hosting for everyone I drew a hopeful picture of managed self-hosting, where anyone can own their data. I skipped over something, and it’s been bugging me since. Hardware costs money, and the sum comes out very differently depending on whether a business or a person is paying.

So here are two rules. Both sound reasonable on their own. Then I’ll put them in the same room.

Self-Hosting for Everyone: A Vision for Digital Agency

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0100

Most people keep their photos at Google, their mail at Gmail, their documents in whatever cloud came with the phone and their passwords in a browser built by an advertising company. Every byte sits on a server they don’t own, under terms they didn’t read, in a country they didn’t check. Nobody finds that strange anymore, because the alternative looks like a second job.

I want to talk about that alternative, and about why it sits behind a wall most people will never climb.

Why I self-host everything: on sovereignty, agency and control

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:00:00 +0100

For a long time the cloud was just the water I swam in. I provisioned managed Kubernetes, clicked through the console, pasted a Terraform module someone else had written, and shipped. It worked. The bill landed every month, the dashboards stayed green, and I didn’t look underneath. Why would I? I trusted it the way you trust a lift. Press the button, doors open.

Then one afternoon a managed service fell over and I sat there with nothing to debug. No host to SSH into, no log I was allowed to read, nothing underneath it I could open up. The status page said “investigating”. Refreshing a page someone else controlled was the whole of my afternoon.