Proxmox

TL;DR Intel iGPU passthrough from Proxmox to a k3s VM enables hardware video transcoding with minimal CPU overhead. This guide covers the complete process: enabling IOMMU, configuring VFIO, blacklisting the i915 driver, rebuilding the VM with q35/OVMF, and verifying VA-API inside the VM. The Intel UHD 630 in the M920q handles H.264 and HEVC encode/decode at real-time speeds. Why GPU Passthrough? Software transcoding (libx264/libx265) on a 6-core i5-8500T is limited: ...

TL;DR Home Assistant runs on k3s using hostNetwork: true for mDNS/SSDP device discovery. I implemented split DNS routing so it is accessible both externally via Traefik and internally via its host IP. Then I built a Proxmox Watchdog — a custom service that monitors all Proxmox hosts via their API and automatically power-cycles unresponsive nodes using TP-Link Kasa HS300 smart power strips. Home Assistant on Kubernetes Home Assistant is one of those applications that does not play well with Kubernetes out of the box. It needs to discover devices on the local network via mDNS, SSDP, and other broadcast protocols. Put it in a regular Kubernetes pod with cluster networking and it cannot see any of your smart home devices. ...

TL;DR Today was cluster genesis. Starting from 3 bare Proxmox hosts, I built the entire infrastructure-as-code pipeline: Terraform to provision VMs from cloud-init templates, Ansible to configure and bootstrap k3s, and a full GitOps deployment model with SOPS-encrypted secrets and S3-backed Terraform state. By end of day: 3 server nodes, 3 agent nodes, cert-manager with Route53 DNS-01 validation, and self-hosted GitHub Actions runners on the cluster itself. The Architecture The design goal was simple: everything as code, nothing manual, everything reproducible. ...

TL;DR After researching rack servers, NUCs, and mini PCs, I settled on the Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q as my homelab node of choice. At roughly $100-150 used, each unit packs an Intel 8th-gen Coffee Lake CPU, supports up to 64GB DDR4, has an NVMe slot, and sips around 15-25W. Three of these running Proxmox VE give me a proper HA cluster without the noise, heat, or power bill of traditional rack gear. ...