Nothing ruins a Monday morning faster than a Proxmox node that hangs at the boot splash screen, then drops you into a recovery shell because the rpool went degraded overnight. We have hit this exact scenario in our own homelab and on customer clusters, and the good news is that you can rebuild full redundancy … Read more
I have run into this exact problem more times than I can count. A Zigbee stick works fine for weeks, then a host reboot silently swaps it with a second stick and Home Assistant stops seeing the right device. This guide is the workflow I now use to make Proxmox USB passthrough survive every reboot. … Read more
Setting up a three-node Proxmox cluster with quorum and live migration gives you the smallest reliable topology for true high availability in Proxmox VE. In this guide I walk you through the exact configuration I use in my own homelab and small production environments, from network planning and cluster creation to quorum tuning and a … Read more
When ZFS flags a pool as DEGRADED, you are looking at a warning, not a catastrophe — yet. Your data is still accessible, but you have lost a layer of redundancy and every minute counts. I have replaced dozens of failed disks across Proxmox, Ubuntu, and TrueNAS servers over the years, and the procedure is … Read more
If you have ever run zpool status after a scrub and seen a non-zero number under the CKSUM column, you already know the mild panic it triggers. ZFS checksum errors after a scrub mean one thing for certain: data on disk and the checksum stored for that data no longer agree. Whether that one error … Read more
Your Home Assistant installation has been running for a few months, and suddenly things feel sluggish. The history page takes forever to load. Your backups are growing larger every week. You check the filesystem and discover that home-assistant_v2.db has ballooned to several gigabytes. Sound familiar? Database bloat is one of the most common performance problems … Read more
If you are reading this, you probably already know the pain. You set up Nextcloud with external SMB storage pointing to your NAS, and everything looked great during testing with a handful of files. Then you loaded your real library and directory listings started taking 8 to 15 seconds. Uploads crawled at half a megabyte … Read more
If you manage a Nextcloud server, you have probably opened the Admin Overview page and seen a yellow or red warning about background jobs not running via cron. It is one of the most common Nextcloud setup warnings, and our team has run into it across bare metal, Docker, and shared hosting deployments. The warning … Read more
If your Nextcloud gallery crawls when you open a folder full of photos, the fix is usually the same: install the Nextcloud Preview Generator app, generate thumbnails ahead of time, and run a cron job (or systemd timer) to keep them fresh. I have been running self-hosted Nextcloud servers since 2018, and the preview generator … Read more
You ran docker-compose pull, restarted your container, and now your Nextcloud instance refuses to load. Instead of your files and calendar, you see a maintenance screen or a cryptic error about unsupported upgrades. If you are staring at the message “Updates between multiple major versions and downgrades are unsupported,” you have landed in one of … Read more