Installing Beszel for Monitoring

It’s time to get some insights into my home lab

My home lab is getting messy and I don’t have a full understanding of what’s running where… i.e. on which of my 5 machines and 3 docker “hosts”.

It’s time to get some clarity and insights with Beszel

Docker Server #3 with CloudInit

Adding redundancy to my Docker environment

I currently run 2 docker VMs but they are running on the same Proxmox instance. However, should that PVE instance go down, I would have nowhere to run any of the containers, so my way of dealing with this is in 2 steps:

• Build a new Proxmox VE server
• Create a new VM to host my containers

Proxmox Server 2

I’m a bad person!

Well, actually, I’m a bad homelab manager. I’be been running my Proxmox lab with no redundancy and few backups. And I’d like this server to run Docker containers for me. As I’m not enamoured with LXC, I will build a VM for my containers.

To address this terrible state of affairs, I need a new Proxmox server and this is how I built it.

Speedtest tracking my network

I like to know what speed i’m getting from my ISP. I found a nifty docker container to do that. The web site also provides instructions for k8s deployment.

Proxmox and CloudInit

I wanted to build a few VMs for my k8s cluster - a master node which would hold the k8s control plane, and a few worker nodes.

I didn’t fancy building 4 VMs for my k8s cluster by manually installing the O/S (Ubuntu 24.04) from the ISO and going through the installation GUI when faster and more reliable methods were available. Enter CloudInit.