Proxmox

TL;DR Upgraded a production k3s cluster from v1.29.0+k3s1 to v1.34.4+k3s1 across 8 nodes — 3 control plane servers, 4 amd64 worker agents, and 1 arm64 Lima VM agent. The upgrade stepped through every minor version (v1.29 → v1.30 → v1.31 → v1.32 → v1.33 → v1.34) with etcd snapshots between each step. Longhorn was upgraded from v1.6.0 to v1.8.2 in two stages (v1.7.3 as an intermediate step). SSH was broken to all cluster nodes, so the entire upgrade was done via Proxmox QEMU Guest Agent (qm guest exec) and Lima CLI (limactl shell). Discovered that k3s intentionally pins Traefik to v2.11.24 even when bundling Helm chart v27 — Traefik v3 migration is a separate effort. ...

TL;DR Prometheus and Grafana both crashed with I/O errors on the same node. Before assuming software, I ran a full hardware audit across all four Proxmox hosts — SMART health, NVMe disk benchmarks (fio), CPU benchmarks (sysbench), memory bandwidth tests, and 10GbE network throughput (iperf3). The result: all hardware is healthy. The I/O errors were Longhorn CSI virtual block device corruption, not physical disk failure. Along the way, I established baseline performance numbers for every subsystem and discovered that custom cooling makes a dramatic difference in thermal performance. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...