Homelab

🧩 Problem I wanted a centralized monitoring platform for my homelab that could monitor: On-premises VMware ESXi hosts Linux virtual machines Windows systems HPE iLO hardware management Cloud-hosted workloads The challenge was that most of my infrastructure lives behind NAT at home, and I did not want to expose services publicly or configure complex port forwarding. 🛠️ Solution Overview I built a hybrid monitoring architecture using: Zabbix 7.0 LTS hosted in Azure ZeroTier for secure private connectivity Zabbix Proxy running locally in my homelab VMware API monitoring for ESXi SNMP monitoring for HPE iLO This design allows cloud-hosted monitoring while keeping home infrastructure private. ...

Network-wide ad blocking using AdGuard Home deployed as a VM on ESXi. Blocks ads, trackers, and malicious domains at the DNS level — before they reach any device on the network. 🖥️ Environment Hypervisor: VMware ESXi VM OS: Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS VM Specs: 3 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 60GB disk AdGuard Home Version: Latest stable 🚀 Step 1: Create the VM on ESXi Created a new VM in the ESXi web UI with the following settings: ...

🧩 Problem I attempted to install ESXi 8 on my Dell OptiPlex homelab machine, but during boot, I encountered a Pink Screen of Death (PSOD) with errors like: Fatal CPU mismatch on feature HW feature incompatibility detected This prevented ESXi from installing or booting successfully. ! 🛠️ Root Cause The issue is caused by modern Intel CPUs (12th Gen and newer) using a hybrid architecture with: Performance cores (P-cores) Efficiency cores (E-cores) ESXi expects uniform CPU cores, so it crashes when it detects different core types. ...

title: Setting up Cloudflare DDNS on Ubuntu using cloudflare-ddns-updater date: 2026-03-20 draft: false tags: cloudflare ddns homelab ubuntu automation 🧩 Problem My home network uses a dynamic public IP address, which changes periodically. This breaks remote access to my self-hosted services. 🛠️ Solution Overview I used an open-source tool (cloudflare-ddns-updater) to automatically update my Cloudflare DNS records whenever my public IP changes. 🔧 Environment Ubuntu Server (DDNS host) Cloudflare domain API Token with DNS edit permissions Git installed 🚀 Step 1: Create Cloudflare API Token Log in to Cloudflare Go to My Profile → API Tokens Create a token with: Zone → DNS → Edit Zone Resources → Specific Zone (your domain) Save the token securely. ...

🧩 Problem I wanted to simulate a real-world security environment in my homelab where I could detect and respond to SSH brute-force attacks and at the same time monitor my devices 🛠️ Solution Overview I deployed Wazuh as a SIEM solution and configured it to detect SSH login attempts and automatically block malicious IPs. 🔧 Environment Ubuntu Server (Wazuh Manager) Linux target machine (with SSH enabled) Public exposure via port forwarding 🚀 Step 1: Install Wazuh curl -sO https://packages.wazuh.com/4.14/wazuh-install.sh && sudo bash ./wazuh-install.sh -a After installation, accessed dashboard: ...