Server on Tom Meurs

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.

CTF and Forensics Skills That Make You a Better DevOps Engineer

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 19:52:00 +0100

TL;DR I spend my evenings on Hack The Box and it’s made me better at my day job, which is platform engineering and has nothing to do with pentesting. The first ten minutes on a CTF box and the first ten minutes on a broken production server are the same loop, with “flag” swapped for “incident”. Below is the toolkit that loop runs on, from one host up to a Kubernetes pod, with the CTF use and the work use side by side for every command.

Simulation, Emulation, Virtualization, and Containers: The Restaurant Metaphor

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:18:00 +0100

TL;DR Simulation models a thing without running it. Emulation runs it by rebuilding the hardware in software. Virtualization runs several complete operating systems on one machine. Containers run several apps on one kernel. Below, one restaurant per term, a table, and the four mix-ups I hear most.

“So what’s the difference between a container and a virtual machine?”

I get this question a lot, usually from someone smart who’s been nodding along in meetings and doesn’t quite want to admit they’re fuzzy on it. The honest answer is that most explanations make it worse. They open with “hypervisor”, “kernel sharing” and “hardware abstraction”, and now the person has four new terms to be confused about instead of one.

Zero Trust Explained: The Hotel Key Card Metaphor

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:34:00 +0100

TL;DR The old model is a castle. Get past the wall and you’re trusted everywhere inside. Zero trust is a hotel. Your key card opens your room, the gym if you booked it, and nothing else, and every door checks the card every time. Below, the three principles, a day in that hotel, and what the key card turns into once the doors are software.

“So what is this zero trust thing everyone keeps talking about?”

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.