Notes from the homelab, the Microsoft 365 admin center, and whatever’s on the workbench.
The newest posts from every category.
Proxmox from scratch · Part 3
This is the third part of Proxmox from scratch. In part 2 we created a virtual machine. This time we make the other kind of guest, a container, and I show how I run my own services in them.
The container in this post is a real one: the one that will run Jellyfin on my main server, phoebe, in the coming Jellyfin at home series. The screenshots are from the evening I created it.
Read article →
The September update was about the new look. This month the work went into the structure underneath it: how posts are grouped, how you get from one to the next, and how a post page uses the screen. And, at last, into writing posts: twelve went online in October, and fifteen since the last week of September. Two series got going: Proxmox from scratch started, and My home servers picked up again after a long pause.
Read article →
My home servers · Part 5
Having a homeserver lets you host your own services. There are a lot of ways to do this. This post explains what a hyperconverged hypervisor is, why I want one, and why I don’t have one yet.
I do not have the luxury of buying new specific hardware that fits the jobs I am looking to solve. I often have to make do with 2nd (or even 3rd) hand hardware to be able to have the systems that run both my business as well as protect our personal data such as photos and important documents.
Read article →
Proxmox from scratch · Part 2
This is the second part of Proxmox from scratch. In part 1 we installed Proxmox VE on a small PC. Now we put it to use and create the first virtual machine.
A virtual machine, or VM, is a whole computer made of software. It has its own virtual disk, memory, processor and network card, and you install an operating system in it the same way you would on a real PC. That makes it the right place for things you don’t want on your own PC, like a test build of a desktop that may well have bugs. That is what I install in mine: the testing edition of KDE neon. I chose it on purpose, because it lets me try the coming Plasma releases before they come out, without risking the desktop I use every day.
Read article →Server builds, Proxmox experiments, storage and networking gear: the practical, hands-on side of running infrastructure at home.
Most posts about backup explain the 3-2-1 rule and then show a setup that follows it. I can’t write that post yet. What I can do is go through the rule, hold my own homelab up against it, and show where it falls short today.
Backblaze puts the rule in one sentence: “keep three copies of your data on two different media with one copy off-site” [1]. The three copies include the original, so it is the data you work on plus two more [1]. “Two different media” comes from the time of tape and CDs. Today Backblaze reads it as two different devices [1]. Off-site means a place that a fire, a burglary or a lightning strike at home doesn’t reach.
Read article →
100 Days of Homelab · Part 2
I am preparing to start the 100 Days of Homelab challenge to educate myself into the different fields of computing that interests me and that will make a difference in my life, such as an improvement of quality of life, enhancing my career, generally sparking my imagination and creative side, and perhaps a mix of them all.
I am planning a reorganisation of my home network, the main goal is to restructure my network backbone and servers so that I can protect and run them in the best way possible. One of the things I would like to do is to setup my key network and my servers is to be supported by some kind of battery backup power system, with the possibility of boosting it with solar power so as to supplement prolong the time I can run them - a) during a power cut and b) with the current energy crisis and cost of energy in mind. Currently the only server I have running 24/7 is a Raspberry Pi that carries my Home Assistant and underneath that my Unifi controller.
Read article →
My first guide is out. Homelab Handbook: Getting Started is a practical, no-nonsense handbook for turning an affordable used PC into your first homelab, and it’s available now from the Kaddu Systems shop.
A homelab is simply a computer (or a few) that you run at home to host services you’d otherwise pay someone else for, or hand your data to.
It can also be a playground where you can experiment and learn new skills, without affecting your production systems and important data.
Read article →
Home network · Part 1
Note
In this post I will be upgrading our home network with the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X. Our home network is due a very needed update as it is not running optimally. We have an reasonable internet connection through our local provider. It is a Fibre connection currently running at 100/100 Mbit/s.
Read article →
Cover image: Nextcloud GmbH, from the Nextcloud Hub 26 Summer press release (see also the Nextcloud press page).
For those of you new to self-hosting and Nextcloud itself, I would like to start this post off with a quick introduction to Nextcloud.
Nextcloud is a way of hosting your own files for yourself and a team similar to what OneDrive and SharePoint do in a Microsoft 365 environment, but without the intranet capability of SharePoint.
Read article →Proxmox from scratch · Part 3
This is the third part of Proxmox from scratch. In part 2 we created a virtual machine. This time we make the other kind of guest, a container, and I show how I run my own services in them.
The container in this post is a real one: the one that will run Jellyfin on my main server, phoebe, in the coming Jellyfin at home series. The screenshots are from the evening I created it.
Read article →Proxmox from scratch · Part 2
This is the second part of Proxmox from scratch. In part 1 we installed Proxmox VE on a small PC. Now we put it to use and create the first virtual machine.
A virtual machine, or VM, is a whole computer made of software. It has its own virtual disk, memory, processor and network card, and you install an operating system in it the same way you would on a real PC. That makes it the right place for things you don’t want on your own PC, like a test build of a desktop that may well have bugs. That is what I install in mine: the testing edition of KDE neon. I chose it on purpose, because it lets me try the coming Plasma releases before they come out, without risking the desktop I use every day.
Read article →
Proxmox from scratch · Part 1
This is the first part of Proxmox from scratch. By the end of it you have a server running Proxmox Virtual Environment, reachable from a browser and up to date. The following parts build on it: virtual machines, containers, storage, networking and backups.
Everything here is done on Proxmox VE 9.2, which came out in May 2026 [7]. If you find an older guide for version 8, be aware that 8 stopped getting security updates on 31 August 2026 [7].
Read article →
Jellyfin 12.0 came out on 7 September, and the first bugfix release, 12.1, followed a week later [1] [3]. If you run 10.11 today, the next version is not 10.12 and not 11. It is 12. Here is what is new, what breaks, and what to do before you press upgrade.
The number first, and a little history, because the obvious question is why a project that began in 2018 was on version 10 at all. Jellyfin started “in early December 2018 primarily as a result of Emby’s decision to take their next release (4.x) closed-source”, as a fork of Emby 3.5.2 [6]. The new project wanted a clean break from Emby’s version numbers, and chose to go up rather than down. The first Jellyfin release, in January 2019, was 10.0.0, and the plan was “10.X.Y, with X being major feature releases and Y being bugfixes” [7].
Read article →My home servers · Part 5
Having a homeserver lets you host your own services. There are a lot of ways to do this. This post explains what a hyperconverged hypervisor is, why I want one, and why I don’t have one yet.
I do not have the luxury of buying new specific hardware that fits the jobs I am looking to solve. I often have to make do with 2nd (or even 3rd) hand hardware to be able to have the systems that run both my business as well as protect our personal data such as photos and important documents.
Read article →
My home servers · Part 4
My main Proxmox server is called phoebe. It is a Lenovo Tiny PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 3400GE processor and 64 GB of RAM, and it runs a couple of LXC containers (Nextcloud among them) and a few virtual machines.
Its storage used to be an NVMe drive for booting and two spinning drives in an OpenZFS mirror: a 4 TB 2.5" hard disk drive inside the case and an 8 TB external drive connected via USB 3. That gave 4 TB of usable space, as the smallest drive in a mirror dictates the capacity.
Read article →
Some of my family’s data resides on a ZFS pool made up of 4 disks that are mirrored two and two. This data has been offline for a little while and I need to reconnect it to look through and reorganise our data storage. The YouTube video futher down this article documents my endeavours to get to these files and data
In this first part I will be looking at the computer I intend to use for this task and I install TrueNAS Scale. The drives are already in the server but I may need to reorganise the hardware a bit.
Read article →
Reading about servers and storage you might have wondered: What is RAID? RAID is a method of melting multiple harddrives together to form a (often) larger logical drive. The acronym expands to either Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks or Redundant Array of Independent Disks.
RAID was defined in a research paper: “A case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)” (Patterson et al, 1988). Andrew S Tanenbaum uses the latter acronym in his book (“Structured Computer Organization 5th Edition”, Tanenbaum, 2006, p 89). I had access to the 5th edition, from which I reference but you can get the 6th edition from Amazon.com and amazon.de (affiliate links).
Read article →The hobby side of computers: old Commodore machines on one side, Linux and open source on the other.
Linux 7.3-rc2 came out on Sunday 6 September, and Linus Torvalds ended the announcement with this: “It might be just random, but we’ll obviously all blame it on AI, because whether that’s really the cause or not, it’s an easy thing to blame ;)” [1]. That line made the headlines [2]. The rest of the email, where he lists what actually made the release big, got far less attention [3].
Read article →
I have been using Linux for a long time. Some times with a Dual Boot setup - that is when the system starts you choose between the installed operating systems e.g. Windows and Linux. And I have been using Linux as the main desktop as well. In this post I will be exploring getting started with Ubuntu.
This write-up will document my choices and reasonings for those choice. Mainly as a reminder to myself but perhaps it can be of use to you too! It will be a “Work-in-Progress” so consider it ever-changing.
Read article →
The Amiga 500 and Amiga 600 relies heavily on their builtin 3.5 inch 880 KB floppy drives. Unfortunately these drives and the floppy disks they store their information on are not aging well. In this post I will be installing a Gotek Floppy Emulator into an external 3.5" floppy drive case to solve this problem.
I originally wrote and posted this article on Amiga Retro Computing.
When I got my new old Amiga 500, I was fortunate enough to also acquire a Gotek Floppy Emulator. The Gotek basically stores images of floppy disks on a USB drive. Many legacy devices like music keyboards, knitting machines, embriodery machines, cnc machines, etc uses 3.5" floppies that are hard to come by as well as failing floppy drives.
Read article →
I finally got back into the Commodore Amiga in late May 2019 by purchasing a used Amiga 500. I have yet to set it up permanently but it has been running a few times. I am planning how to set it up physically as well as how my setup will be with regard to software and hardware, etc.
This article was originally posted on my old Amiga site (Amiga Retro Computing)
Read article →As you may have read in My Commodore history – part one: Commodore 64, my computer story started with a Commodore 64. Through a friend, who had an Amiga 1000 I was introduced to the Amiga world. As I remember, he later got both an Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000. He actually had an Atari ST as well.
This post originally appeared on my old Amiga site (Amiga Retro Computing).
If you have yet to read part one, you can read it here: My Commodore history - part one: Commodore 64
Read article →My history with having computers started with the Commodore 64.
This post originally appeared on my old Amiga site (Amiga Retro Computing).
In the early 1980’s when I was a child, me and my friends frequented the retail shops in town that had computers. Back then shops used to have computers on display that you could try. Only from time to time you would get told to move on.
Those days the computers were the Texas Instruments TI-99, the Power 3000 - a rebranded Lambda 8300, the Amstrad CPC 464 and the Commodore Vic 20 and Commodore 64. The ZX 81 and ZX Spectrum must have been present as well but I do not remember seeing them until later.
Read article →The work side: Microsoft 365 administration, the certifications I'm working through, and finding (and keeping) a place in IT.
As Microsoft has been moving away from on-prem tools like SCCM and Domain Controllers to cloud they introduced a new exam to reflect this change towards the cloud and tools like Intune, Entra, and Autopilot. And for the new Endpoint Manager that also meant a new certification to replace the old MD-100 Windows Client, and MD-101 Managing Modern Desktops.
As a budding Systems Administrator, MD-102 Endpoint Administrator is a good way of learning about modern Endpoint Management and protection, as well as document my knowledge. But how much of the old ways should I also learn?
Read article →At the end of 2024, I got a small contract job doing as an End User Support Specialist at HAVI Logistics in Vejle. That meant that I could a little bit of what I did before, though it was main level 1 work, with very limited access into Microsoft 365 admin, Intune, etc. The rest of the week, I continued being a Charity Fundraiser.
Then mid-January 2025 I was offered a 2 month contract as an IT Supporter with Mansoft, providing Level 1 & 2 support from the Digital Workplace department of a manufacturing company in Stilling, as well as helping out our sister department Manufacturing IT, whenever there was an IT-related stop on a production line. This position got extended twice until late May 2025.
Read article →As Microsoft has been moving away from on-prem tools like SCCM and Domain Controllers to cloud they introduced a new exam to reflect this change towards the cloud and tools like Intune, Entra, and Autopilot. And for the new Endpoint Manager that also meant a new certification to replace the old MD-100 Windows Client, and MD-101 Managing Modern Desktops.
As a budding Systems Administrator, MD-102 Endpoint Administrator is a good way of learning about modern Endpoint Management and protection, as well as document my knowledge. But how much of the old ways should I also learn?
Read article →
Note
Patch Tuesday was on 13 October, and this one was more than a batch of fixes. Several products got their last update on the same day, three things had already changed on 1 October, and a Secure Boot certificate expires six days later. Here is the month as a list, with what to check for each.
Read article →
Two Windows dates have been mixed together in a lot of headlines this autumn, so here they are, separated.
Each yearly version of Windows 11 is only maintained for a limited time. For Home and Pro that is two years, and 24H2 came out on 1 October 2024 [1]. After 13 October, a PC that is still on 24H2 gets no more security fixes.
Read article →
On Tuesday 13 October 2026, Office 2021 gets its last update. That goes for the version you bought in a shop and for Office LTSC 2021, the version organisations buy through volume licensing [1] [2]. Microsoft leaves no opening: “there will be no extension and no extended security updates” [1].
Word and Excel will start on 14 October exactly as they did the day before. “All of your Office 2021 apps may continue to function. However, you could expose yourself to serious and potentially harmful security risks.” [1]
Read article →Reading lists, reviews and notes on the books behind how I run IT and my homelab, plus the occasional one that has nothing to do with computers.
This is my current book list as of early august 2026. Books I want to read, but have yet to. Some I have probably started a few times, some looked at, some just looked interesting.
I will try to post an updated list from time to time. And the plan is still to read a book all the way through and hopefully post a review of it.
Read article →
It is imperative to keep up with new knowledge in the IT business, whether it is networking, programming, AI or other areas. The following is a list of books that I have purchased and placed on my reading list. They are mainly programming books on different programming languages and frameworks. But there are also a few others on the list.
As I go through the list and complete reading each book, I will publish a review on the book. When a review is available, it will be linked here as well.
Read article →Hands-on electronics projects: DIY battery packs from salvaged lithium-ion cells, and the small radio and sensor builds around my homelab.
DIY battery pack · Part 1
Many people have built battery packs out of both Nickel and Lithium based batteries for their own personal use. Maybe as a battery bank for a Solar system or for a smaller use case. I have been contemplating to build my own version of a standardised(ish) DIY battery pack. One that I could use for multiple applications.
I will be using 18650 Lithium-Ion batteries mostly harvested from disused laptop battery packs. If you have access to laptop batteries in chances are that you would be able to salvage at least some of their cells for this use. The challenge for the future in this respect will be the ever thinner laptops are using more custom battery cells than 18650 cells in order to become as thin as possible. Another source could be surplus battery packs for discontinued laptops and other battery operated appliances. These would then be available for purchase at sell-out prices.
Read article →News about the site itself: site updates, new features, and what's coming.
The September update was about the new look. This month the work went into the structure underneath it: how posts are grouped, how you get from one to the next, and how a post page uses the screen. And, at last, into writing posts: twelve went online in October, and fifteen since the last week of September. Two series got going: Proxmox from scratch started, and My home servers picked up again after a long pause.
Read article →
In the August update I promised that the site would be redesigned as we went. A month later, most of that list is done, and the site looks and works quite differently. Here’s what changed, and what’s coming.
The minimalistic look from early August is gone. The site now has its own colour scheme: a dark charcoal frame around a warm parchment reading area, with terracotta and pine green as accent colours, and a serif font for headings.
Read article →Note
This site has long been in a state of missing new posts. But here’s to a new lease!
It actually comes not just as a refresh, but a whole new base, as we have changed from Wordpress as a CRM to an Open Source Static site generator called HUGO. This shift should make the site delivery a lot faster, as the pages are actually pre-generated abd just needs to be served straight from the server.
Read article →100 Days of Homelab · Part 1
… and 100 Days of Homelab!
Huge apologies for this past years hiatus. I have not posted in more than a year. Actually my latest post was April 24th 2021. But now I am back!!!
A lot has happened since my last post. First of all I started a new job on October 1st as an IT Technician, working at a small IT company. We do IT support for small businesses and private individuals. We are mainly a Microsoft shop, but I do get to do a few other things from time to time.
Read article →