Homelab Handbook: Getting Started is now available

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.

What it is and who it’s for

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.

Home network · Part 1

Upgrading our home network with a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X

Home network v. 1.0

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. 

What's new in Nextcloud 35 (Hub 26 Summer), and what's next in 36

Cover image: Nextcloud GmbH, from the Nextcloud Hub 26 Summer press release (see also the Nextcloud press page).

A short history of Nextcloud

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.

Proxmox from scratch · Part 5

Networking inside Proxmox

So far every guest in this series has been plugged into vmbr0, and I told you to keep the default. In this part we look at what that means, how to split guests into separate networks, and how to find out what a guest is actually doing on the network.

How Proxmox networking works

Linux bridges (vmbr0)

A bridge is a switch made of software. Your guests’ virtual network cards plug into it, and so does a physical network port on the server. The installer sets up exactly one: it “creates a single bridge named vmbr0, which is connected to the first Ethernet card” [1]. The server’s own IP address sits on that bridge as well.

Proxmox from scratch · Part 4

Storage in Proxmox

This is the fourth part of Proxmox from scratch. In part 2 and part 3 we created a virtual machine and a container, and both times I put their disks on a storage called vmdatanvme and promised to explain it later. This is later.

The post has two halves. The first is a tour: how Proxmox thinks about storage, and the kinds it can use, from a folder on the server’s own disk to Ceph spread over several servers. The second is what I do on my own servers, and here there is a twist. In part 7 my servers become a cluster, and in part 8 guests move between them. For that to work, the storage has to be set up the same way on every server, and that is easiest to get right now, before there is a cluster.

Proxmox from scratch · Part 3

Setting up an LXC container in Proxmox

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.

Proxmox from scratch · Part 2

Setting up a Virtual Machine in Proxmox

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.

Jellyfin at home · Part 1

Jellyfin on Proxmox: running it in an LXC container

This is the first part of Jellyfin at home. By the end of it Jellyfin 12 is running on my Proxmox server, it answers in a browser, and the first library is in. The parts after this one are about naming the files so Jellyfin recognises them, hardware transcoding, apps and remote access, and backups and upgrades.

This is my own Jellyfin server being built, not a demo. I write down what I did, including what I would do differently.

What's new in Jellyfin 12, and what to check before you upgrade

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.

From 10.11 to 12

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].

My home servers · Part 6

My hypervisors in 2026: phoebe, priscilla and stephen

The last two parts of this series were about getting here: a new Proxmox server, and the one big box I would build if I could. This part is about what I actually have. Three machines, what each one is for, and how they are going to work together.

From one big server to three small ones

This series started with an HP ProLiant ML150 G6 from 2009 and the Smart Array controller I put in it. Two years ago I took stock of what I had. The ML150 has since been retired and is gone.

My home servers · Part 5

Hyperconverged Hypervisor

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.

My home servers · Part 4

New Proxmox homeserver

My current Proxmox server

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.

Explainer: What is RAID?

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).

Torvalds joked about blaming AI for Linux 7.3-rc2 — what actually happened

The joke: “We’ll obviously all blame it on AI”

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].

Getting started with Ubuntu on your desktop

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.

Installing a Gotek into an external floppy case

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.

My Commodore history - part three: Back to the Amiga

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)

My Commodore history - part two: Commodore Amiga

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

My Commodore history - part one: Commodore 64

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.

MD-102 Old vs New Exam

MD-102 Endpoint Administrator replaces MD-100 + MD-101

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?

How to get (back) into IT

Update July 2026

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.

November 2026 for Microsoft admins: October follow-up, Patch Tuesday on 10 November and a new Copilot

Before the next Patch Tuesday, a look back at the last one. October’s update was the largest Microsoft has shipped, and a few of its problems only showed up afterwards. Then what we can say about tomorrow, which isn’t much, the release settings that change this month, and Copilot, which has changed more in six weeks than most products do in a year.

MD-102 Old vs New Exam

MD-102 Endpoint Administrator replaces MD-100 + MD-101

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?

October 2026 for Microsoft admins: what changed on the 1st, and what ends on Patch Tuesday

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.

Windows 11 24H2 gets its last update on 13 October, and Windows 10 gets another year

Two Windows dates have been mixed together in a lot of headlines this autumn, so here they are, separated.

• Windows 11, version 24H2, Home and Pro: the last update comes on Tuesday 13 October 2026 [1].
• Windows 10: nothing ends this month. The extended security updates for home users, which were supposed to stop now, run until 12 October 2027 [2].

Windows 11 24H2: update to a newer version

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.