Proxmox

When I expanded my homelab I bought two mini PCs. One Dell DeskMini and a Lenovo ThinkCenter. While the 16GB of RAM and 512GB NVMe SSD of the Lenovo are enough for many homelab needs, I wanted to expand both to match the Dells 32GB/1TB. Especially since I have two 16GB sticks of SO-DIMM memory and a 1TB SSD from my old laptop just laying around collecting dust. Expanding the memory is easy, just open the bottom access hatch of the ThinkCenter take out the old RAM and install the new one....

I recently expanded my homelab with a Mini PC which has a i7-8700T CPU with an integrated GPU. Using a GPU to offload transcoding from the CPU can massively increase the transcoding performance while reducing CPU load. This means a faster Jellyfin Server and more CPU time for other tasks. However, using a GPU in a Virtual Machine (VM) is not always straight forward. Luckily, in Proxmox it is just a few commands away....

LXC containers provide an easy way to run applications on Proxmox with very little overhead compared to virtual machines. Unprivileged containers provide greater security compared to privileged containers. Usage of privileged containers is highly discouraged in the Proxmox documentation. However if you want to enroll LXC containers in a domain managed with FreeIPA, this will not work with unprivileged containers out of the box. Why Enrolling an Unprivileged Container is not Possible An unprivileged LXC container cannot be enrolled, due to the very high UID and GUID numbers used by FreeIPA....

Terraform is a widely used tool for Infrastructure as Code (IaC). It can be used to define and provision all kinds of resources, from VMs to databases and DNS records. In collaboration with Proxmox it can be used to create VMs and LXC containers. However one thing I struggled with for a long time was automatically enrolling a newly created VM in a FreeIPA domain. To do this three steps are needed....