I use Wireguard, so when I am outside, connected to my VPN, I use the internal DNS (pihole) for accessing internal network services using their fqdn.

Like other people suggested here, use opnsense instead of pfsense, and wireguard instead of openvpn. What I did for my homelab was to get a used HP t620 thinclient and an Intel 350 card with 2x 1gbps ports. You say you have 10gbps, so you would need a card that can handle that, and maybe a beefier CPU. For my setup, this tiny 65€ machine is not even feeling it. Single digit cpu usage for 2 wireguard connections, a little over 1GB RAM usage for a handful of services. I think for you an n100 with 4gb of ram is more than enough, but going for 8gb will be better and it will not be much more expensive.

:| gosh… I’ll go back to edit it.

For live monitoring (not offline!), maybe dozzle can help?

I know about pbs, I even have an IP set aside for it :) I do have the built-in proxmox backup function take nightly snapshots or my important vms to my nas, but I don’t have anything really put together. Also, nothing for my nas itself. It is configured in a raid 5, but as we all know, raid is not backup :)

One day, after I am done with [insert reason here], I will have a bad ass, well thought out backup solution.

My backup concept is on the to-do list. Been there for a couple years. I do have triple pihole/caddy/haproxy/redis for high availability on a triple node proxmox cluster! necessary? no. cool, though? heck yeah! friends and family impressed? uhm… what was the question?

I use the reporting tools on my opnsense box.

 igb0  /  yearly

         year        rx      |     tx      |    total    |   avg. rate
     ------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
          2023     33.97 TiB |   22.90 TiB |   56.87 TiB |   15.86 Mbit/s
          2024    110.69 TiB |   32.26 TiB |  142.95 TiB |   39.76 Mbit/s
          2025     22.20 GiB |    7.14 GiB |   29.34 GiB |    4.35 Mbit/s
     ------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------

I’m actually doing the opposite :)

I’ve been using vms, lxc containers and docker for years. In the last 3 years or so, I’ve slowly moved to just docker containers. I still have a few vms, of course, but they only run docker :)

Containers are a breeze to update, there is no dependency hell, no separate vms for each app…

More recently, I’ve been trying out kubernetes. Mostly to learn and experiment, since I use it at work.

What do you mean it’s hard to update containers?

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I don’t live so far north, but good, light, waterproof boots. Of course, everything else people recommended already - good gloves, socks, jacket, and layers. But for me personally, boots would be the most important.

How is duckdns unreliable? I use it just to have wireguard access, been using it for years. Just curious about your issues…

Look into mattermost. Quite powerful, and free.

We’re using a self hosted Nexus instance at work. You probably don’t need all the features it offers, but it does its job really well. For free, too.

I have been using an Android XiaomiTV, with SmartTube and Jellyfin, Netflix and Prime. I do have a pihole, though.

I use Netcup. Reliable, simple, great deals from time to time (such as Black Friday).

I’m an arch user, and also have a small proxmox based homelab. I always have a live Ubuntu around, the latest desktop version available. Good for troubleshooting. Also, latest proxmox, opnsense, pfsense, debian.

Additionally, I have a small USB drive on my keychain with both USB C and USB A, where I keep some encrypted backups of important stuff, and I can access that from both my laptop and my phone.

I use wildcard certs. I don’t know if this completely fixes the issue, though.

Yup, I have a domain I purchased and on my lan I use PiHole and Caddy. All my apps and services use the format app.mydomain.com. PiHole forwards all requests for *.mydomain.com to Caddy, which handles the LE certificate (via DNS challenge) and forwards the requests to the proper IP:PORT. I started using this for everything, my Proxmox hosts, printer, my APs…