Proxmox
3 Nov 2025
Using Proxmox as a Home Server Part IV - HASS and ESPHome
This installment will focus on installing and configuring Home Assistant and ESPHome in a Fedora LXC container using docker-compose.
Home Assistant and ESPHome Explained
Home Assistant (HASS) is a free, open source, home automation platform. Unlike some other platforms, it keeps all your data local unless you choose to send it somewhere else. Its an excellent way of combining multiple ecosystems and devices into one place, and enables a level of automation and monitoring that you couldn’t have if you were using an individual service provider for each of your devices. If you have a smart home device, from a lightbulb to a camera to your washing machine, a local sensor providing information on sound levels or environmental conditions, or even your energy providers API, chances are someone, somewhere, has enabled its integration with home assistant. What that means is that you can turn on your air purifier when your particle counter detects high pollution levels, or have your porch light turn on when you arrive home in your car, or pretty much anything else you could want. Hell, I know someone who has it flash the lights in their house when someone rings their doorbell, because it was cheaper and easier than getting one designed for the hearing impaired.
26 Oct 2025
Using Proxmox as a Home Server Part III - NAS Connections
Now that we’ve created the storage pool and spun up our container(s), we need to be able to connect our devices. There are a range of methods we can use to do this, and if theres a device thats not covered, there is almost certainly a guide out there for it.
Linux Clients
First off, we start with Linux clients. We’ll split this into 2 sections, temporary connections, and auto-mounts.
17 Oct 2025
Using Proxmox as a Home Server Part II - SSHFS NAS
In part 2 of this series of guides, we will create a ZFS pool on our storage media, and then create our first LXC container to provide access to them over the network.
What is ZFS?
ZFS, short for Zettabyte File System, was first released 20 years ago next month (November 2025). It provides not just the functions expected of a filesystem, which manages the data thats stored on a volume, but also functions as the physical volume manager, allowing us to take multiple physical disks, and present them to the OS as a single, formatted, device.
4 Oct 2025
Using Proxmox as a home server part I - Installing PVE
This will be the first in a series of blog posts describing how I use PVE as a base for my NAS, and to host other services. In this installment, I’ll discuss the the hardware required, the installation of PVE, and the initial post-install configuration.
Why use Proxmox?
There are plenty of choices for an OS to build on. Picking one is going to depend on what you want it to do. If all you want is something to host media files on, OpenMediaVault is an excellent choice, as is LibreELEC. I want to goa little further, with a single server to act not just as a NAS, but to run Home Assistant, and several other services. This means I want a hypervisor, where I can virtualise each of these services. While the above choices can all be made to act as a hypervisor, they lack the ease of use of systems designed specifically around it.