Hardware I can touch. 

Platform & storage 6

• Proxmox VE hostSingle-node hypervisor: VMs and unprivileged LXCs, NVMe for guests, HDD pool for backup and media.Proxmox
• Raw block device sanitisation → XFSNine-stage wipe, GPT label, sector-aligned partition, XFS with reflink, UUID mount with nofail. Verified by df, not by exit code.storageXFS
• Docker host VM + PortainerUbuntu VM with Docker, Compose and Portainer for the containers that do not warrant their own LXC.Docker
• Ubuntu server VMUbuntu 24.04 LTS on VirtIO — the general-purpose Linux box for learning and automation.Ubuntu
• Windows 11 VMUEFI/VirtIO Windows guest with a VPN kill-switch and a Samba path straight into the media mount.Windows
• Host reboot-failure recovery runbookTwo incidents merged into one runbook: root cause, chronological fixes, final stable configuration.incident

Services 9

• NextcloudFiles, calendars, contacts in an LXC — with the operational, security and backup steps a bare install leaves out.
• ImmichPhoto and video backup in an unprivileged Debian 13 LXC with Docker Compose and direct NVMe bind-mounts; multi-user for the family.
• Plex with GPU passthroughPlex in an LXC with Intel Arc passthrough for hardware transcoding; later a 4 TB NVMe expansion exposed to Plex and as a Samba share.
• Samba file serverDebian 12 LXC, authenticated shares for Windows, macOS and Linux; Ubuntu clients auto-mount by UNC path with a startup delay so the network is up first.
• Pi-holeNetwork-wide DNS sink in an LXC, configured almost entirely through the two web UIs.
• Homepage + Nginx Proxy ManagerA dashboard for everything, and a reverse proxy in front of it — with DNS forwarding so names resolve inside the LAN.
• Stirling-PDFSelf-hosted PDF tooling — merge, split, convert, OCR — so documents never leave the network.
• Monitoring stackInfluxDB, Grafana and Uptime Kuma in one Compose file: metrics, dashboards, and availability of every service.
• SOP sync automationPowerShell + Robocopy + Task Scheduler mirrors the documentation folder to the NAS on every login. Native tools only.

Backup & disaster recovery 4

• Proxmox Backup ServerPBS as a VM with a 12 TB HDD passed through raw; datastore, pruning, garbage collection, fingerprint-bound to the datacenter.
• Hybrid backup architectureTwo independent layers: PBS for VM/LXC snapshots, and a cron-driven rsync pipeline for Plex media, Nextcloud data and host configuration.
• Host-push → PBS-pull migrationMoved backup execution off the hypervisor onto the PBS VM: SSH-pull rsync, legacy cron retired, dry-run validated.
• Bare-metal host-OS disaster recoveryNightly proxmox-backup-client snapshot of the host layer — fstab, bridges, GPU passthrough, PVE state — with an append-only API token.