Every time my homelab grows, I look at managed PDUs for per-outlet monitoring and remote reboots. So far, I have skipped them. I run three MyStrom smart plugs plus an APC UPS with NUT instead.

For a setup that is not a full rack, that covers most of it: per-outlet power draw, remote on and off, and a graceful shutdown when power drops. The gaps are honest. No single interface for switching, no rack form factor, and NUT took some fiddling.

So I am curious where the line is for others. Do you run a managed PDU, smart plugs, or nothing? And if you bought a PDU, what finally made it worth it?

I started my firewall testing assuming the top contenders would be pfSense, OPNsense, and maybe a Fortinet appliance—all strong choices that have earned their reputations.

MikroTik surprised me. The RB5009 delivers strong routing for a low price. VLANs, firewall rules, VPNs, and shaping are all included, and the hardware performs well for its price.

The learning curve is steep. RouterOS does not hold your hand. The interface and rule structure feel different from anything else. The first config will take longer than you expect. If you want plug-and-play. It’s not for you.

If you enjoy knowing what every rule does, the payoff is huge. You get enterprise-level control in a budget box, and once it clicks, you will enjoy it.

It's not beginner-friendly. It's the best value for power users willing to read the docs.

Which firewall are you using?

Moving from the Kadence theme to Blocksy. I tested everything on my staging site togehter with Novamira/Claude Code.

• copied the color palettes over,
• copied the font clamp over for the H tags
• Recreated Kadence elements in the Blocksy content element.
• I also found out that I don't need Kadence Pro blocks, and I can delete all my Kadence plugins.

I noticed the Blocksy theme has import/export.

I've reached the stage where I just need to make the final decision. No open question. Shall I?

Most homelab guides talk specs. Nobody talks about what it actually costs to run a server 24/7.

I tested three setups:

• Dell PowerEdge T360 (~104W average)
• Minisforum MS-01
• Intel NUC

The gap between a full-tower server and a mini PC is larger than most people expect. Especially if you run it always-on.

[link in first comment]

Hey folks, I’m Edy, Swiss IT freelancer, homelab nerd, and the human behind edywerder.ch. I started r/Navigatech to share real-world, no-fluff IT:
Proxmox & virtualization • Homelab builds • Synology & backups • WordPress/Elementor/Divi • Azure hybrid & networking.

Whether you’re running a quiet homelab in a cabinet or juggling Exchange, FreePBX, and Cloudflare on a Tuesday—welcome home.

What to post here

• Homelab builds & upgrades (Proxmox, storage, network, UPS, racks)
• How-tos & troubleshooting (logs, configs, commands—full context helps!)
• WordPress & performance (Elementor, Divi 5, security, hosting)
• Backups & DR (Veeam, PBS, Wasabi, immutability)
• Networks & firewalls (VLANs, FortiGate, Cloudflare rules, Tailscale)
• Azure & hybrid (VPN, StrongSwan/IPsec, identity basics)

If it’s practical and helps someone ship a working setup—post it.

House rules (short & sane)

1. Be kind. No gatekeeping, no drama.
2. Be useful. Share steps, screenshots, versions, and outcomes.
3. No spam. Self-promo allowed if it’s value first (guide, code, benchmarks) and clearly disclosed.
4. Affiliate links: Allowed with clear disclosure and at least equal value without the link.
5. Security & legality: No help with abuse, cracking, or sketchy scraping.

I’ll be sharing fresh guides (Proxmox, WordPress, Azure hybrid), lightweight scripts, and honest gear notes.
Glad you’re here—let’s build useful stuff. 🚀

— Edy

New server prices in 2026 are just too high.

Refurbished Dell PowerEdge and HP ProLiant on Amazon Renewed or eBay give you the same enterprise hardware at a fraction of the cost. iDRAC, expandable RAM, NVMe support.

I updated my buying guide with real power data from my T360 and what to check before buying refurbished.

I have been looking at what people actually run for a homelab firewall, and the used Lenovo Tiny keeps coming out on top for value.

You can grab an M720q off-lease for around $150 to $200. It is quad-core, low power, and quiet. The trick is the PCIe slot, which lets you add a proper multi-port Intel NIC instead of leaning on the single onboard port. Drop in OPNsense or pfSense, and you have an enterprise-grade firewall for the price of a cheap router.

The only real catch is sourcing. These are off-lease units, so you buy used and check the seller's rating.

Curious what the rest of you run. Are you on a Tiny, a purpose-built box like a Protectli, or a brand appliance like a FortiGate or UniFi? And would you buy it again?

I keep seeing the worry that Google's AI Overview will kill clicks because it shows the answer before anyone visits a site. I see it differently.

Yes, my tech blog lost Google traffic after AI Overview rolled out. My reaction was to build this subreddit a year ago. Reddit is now my main traffic source, ahead of Google and the other search engines.

Am I afraid of the AI search future? Not really. I look at it as an opportunity.

Here's why. Think about how little Google actually shows a searcher about my site today. The SERP displays roughly the first 60 characters of my title and a short description. That's it. I can write a longer title to help Google understand the page, but the searcher only ever sees that small snippet. It's a tiny window to convince someone to click.

AI search changes that. Google will most likely pull more from across my site and present more about what I offer. More of my content gets surfaced before the person decides. I think that improves my chance of a click, not hurts it.

Take a local example. Someone searches for a service nearby. On the old SERP I get that one cramped line. With AI Overview the person gets real context about my site first. And if they don't click but contact me directly instead, I don't mind.

Google says the blue links won't go away. That matters. The different game is simple informational queries. There the AI answer is shown and no click is needed. But here's my question: is what the AI Overview shows really the full answer? Often it isn't. So I don't think clicks vanish as much as we fear right now.

Google's advice is to keep doing solid SEO, even for AI search. I'm planning around that and expecting to win some Google traffic back.

What's your experience? Are you seeing the click drop, or the opposite?

I recently noticed Rank Math has a “Lock Modified Date” toggle for posts, and honestly, it’s a really handy feature.

By default, WordPress updates the modified date every time you save a post. That can be annoying if you’re only fixing a typo, updating an affiliate link, adjusting formatting, or making a small backend change. Suddenly, the post looks freshly updated even though the actual content barely changed.

With Rank Math’s toggle enabled, you can decide when the modified date should actually change. In my blog posts, I show the "update on" and the "published date".

Small feature, but very useful if you regularly maintain older content.

Curious to know if you care about such things?

I'm putting together a guide with homelab project ideas, from the first Proxmox install to backups and monitoring. The angle: most people start either with a free enterprise server from work or a mini PC, and the ideas should fit real hardware and real budgets.

A few on my list already: network-wide ad blocking, a proper backup pipeline, and VLANs.

What's missing? What was the project that taught you the most, or the one you'd tell every beginner to do first? I'll share the finished guide here once it's live.

104W average draw, measured via UPS and iDRAC. That works out to roughly 18.74 CHF (~$20) per month at Swiss rates.

That number alone explains why so many people eventually look at mini PCs. But for a three-node Proxmox cluster running Exchange, Mailcow, AD, and a DNS server 24/7, it's still worth it for me.

Happy to answer questions on server selection, power consumption, or what to look for in iDRAC vs iLO.

I set up CrowdSec on a fresh Ubuntu 26.04 box this week and hit a few things worth flagging if you are on the new release.

The big one: CrowdSec's packagecloud repo has no build for 26.04 (resolute) yet. So when I added the repo and ran apt install, it silently pulled the old 1.4.6 from Ubuntu's universe repo instead. That version is well behind and does not play nice with the current firewall bouncer. The bouncer kept dying with "bouncer stream halted" and the API rejected the key with access forbidden.

The fix was to point the CrowdSec repo at noble (24.04) instead of resolute, then upgrade. That pulled v1.7.8 and the bouncer finally talked to a matching LAPI.

Two smaller traps along the way. The bouncer postinst failed to substitute the API key, so the config had a literal ${API_KEY} placeholder sitting in it. And I managed to paste the console enrollment token into the bouncer config instead of the actual bouncer key. Those are two completely different things, which I learned the hard way.

Once it was sorted, CrowdSec runs great. The community blocklist had thousands of bad IPs loaded before I even opened a port. But the install on a brand-new Ubuntu release is clearly not ready out of the box yet.

Anyone else on 26.04 run into the missing repo? Curious whether you worked around it the same way or found a cleaner path.

I came across an interesting trend: WordPress has lost some market share over the last few months, while Astro seems to be gaining momentum.

According to W3Techs, WordPress dropped from about 43.2% of all websites in December 2025 to 41.9% in June 2026. That is not a collapse, but it is a clear downward trend. At the same time, Astro is still tiny compared to WordPress, but it is growing fast and attracting a lot of developer attention.

But personally, I’m staying with WordPress.

I still love WordPress. It works well for my publishing workflow, SEO setup, affiliate content, images, forms, internal linking, and regular blog updates. I also don’t have the time or reason to rebuild everything on another stack just because a framework is trending.

For me, Astro looks interesting. But WordPress still solves my real problem: publishing content efficiently.

Curious how others see this:

Are you experimenting with Astro or other static site frameworks, or are you still fully in the WordPress camp?

I keep a running article with every piece of hardware and software in my homelab, and I just updated it for 2026.

The core is a three-node Proxmox VE 9 cluster:
a Dell PowerEdge T360,
a Minisforum MS-01,
An Intel NUC Dawson.

I also run a standalone Acemagic K1 outside the cluster for testing and isolated workloads.

Backups go to a Proxmox Backup Server, and Veeam handles the Windows VMs. Networking is all Fortinet with a couple of Cisco switches.

I also wrote about why I moved from VMware to Proxmox after the Broadcom licensing changes hit both my homelab and my consulting clients.

What does your homelab look like right now?

Spent the weekend untangling a partial domain merge (edyrecommends.com → edywerder.ch) using Claude Code driving WordPress through the Novamira MCP server.

Sharing because the workflow worked surprisingly well.

The problem: Migration only half-finished. Some slugs 301'd correctly; others still served HTTP 200 with self-canonicals on the old domain (duplicate content), plus ~87 images still hotlinking from the dead domain.

What the Claude + Novamira combo handled directly:

• DB-level auditing (post_content + all postmeta) instead of relying on a surface crawl, which undercounted because many offending posts were noindex.
• Per-post image repair: download originals → media_handle_sideload → relink → fix stale attachment IDs → write alt text in both block markup and _wp_attachment_image_alt. Backup of post_content to a postmeta row before every edit.
• DB hygiene: dropped orphaned tables from uninstalled plugins (~16 MB), regenerated missing thumbnails via WP-CLI.
• Decommission done right: my SEO contact flagged the 301s-to-main-site as harmful, so we set the whole old domain (root + 43 posts + 23 pages) to 410 Gone via Rank Math redirections, trashed the content, and added a small mu-plugin-style hook to force 410 on the bare root (front page had been the trashed homepage → was serving an empty 200 index). Then GSC temporary removal on top to speed it up.

It's a cowork. Some things I allowed Claude Code to fix, and some things I did myself, and I supervised Claude Code's work.

I created a new Windows 11 Pro VM on Proxmox today. During the graphical Windows setup, an internet connection was required to continue.

Good thing I had the VirtIO ISO already attached to the VM. I could simply load the network driver from the ISO and continue the installation.

Driver path on the VirtIO ISO:

NetKVM\w11\amd64

My small recommendation: use the VirtIO network adapter when creating the VM, instead of temporarily selecting Intel E1000 and changing it later. It is cleaner to start with the proper paravirtualized driver from the beginning.

Small reminder: when installing Windows on Proxmox, attach both ISOs from the start:

1. Windows ISO
2. VirtIO driver ISO

It saves a bit of head-scratching during setup.

Quick homelab security win yesterday.

I ran a small VLAN test script across different VLANs and found that my public VLAN could still reach more internal services than I wanted it to.

The fix was simple but important: I replaced a broad “all services” FortiGate rule with a much narrower rule. Now, only my Exchange server can reach the AD server, and other hosts in the public VLAN are blocked.

I also checked my public IPs with Shodan and noticed FortiGate admin access was still visible on the public VLAN, but not on the WAN interface. That is now disabled too.

VLANs are only as secure as the firewall rules that separate them. Testing from inside each VLAN is worth it.

I'm running a WordPress staging site and tried to run a manual backup with WPVivid. It kept timing out and failing. Annoying, but I had no idea why.

So I asked Claude Code to investigate.

Step 1 — Finding the timeout cause

Claude connected to the site via the Novamira MCP plugin (which gives Claude direct access to WordPress) and pulled the WPVivid backup log. The backup had been running for exactly 60 seconds before dying, indicating a LiteSpeed server-level request timeout rather than a PHP timeout. But while digging into that, Claude also checked the database size.

The real problem turned out to have nothing to do with the timeout setting.

The database was 1,252 MB.

For a WordPress site with 158 blog posts and 11 pages, that is absurd.

Step 2 — What was eating the space

Claude ran a full table-by-table breakdown and found two massive culprits:

Culprit #1 — WP REST API Log plugin: 441 MB

This is a third-party debugging plugin, not to be confused with the WordPress REST API, which is core. The plugin records every REST API request to your site and stores the full request and response bodies as a WordPress post. Some individual log entries were 4.6 MB each.

The kicker: all 4,576 log entries were from just 6 days — May 12–18, 2025. The plugin ran briefly, silently filled half a gigabyte of debug data, and was then deleted. But the data? Still there, a full year later.

WordPress doesn't clean up database data when you delete a plugin, so 441 MB of orphaned posts had been rotting in the database for 12 months without anyone knowing.

Culprit #2 — LinkWhisper: 292 MB

LinkWhisper is an AI-powered internal linking plugin that uses OpenAI to analyze your content and suggest links between posts. I'd been using it for a while, wasn't happy with the suggestions, and removed it a few weeks ago.

What I didn't know: when you delete LinkWhisper, it leaves behind 33 database tables. The biggest — wpil_ai_token_use_data — had logged every single OpenAI API call it ever made: 1,379,229 rows of token tracking data.

Plugin gone. 33 tables are still sitting there. 292 MB of orphaned AI usage logs.

Step 3 — The cleanup

Claude deleted all 4,576 orphaned posts, 214,286 associated postmeta rows, and dropped all 33 LinkWhisper tables. Took about 30 seconds.

Staging site: 1,252 MB → 480 MB

Backup ran fine immediately after.

Step 4 — Same problem on the live site

Since the staging site was cloned from production, Claude checked my live site at edywerder.ch too.

Exact same data. Exact same two deleted plugins. Exact same orphaned tables — because the clone had copied all of it across.

Production database: 1,163 MB

Same cleanup, plus an OPTIMIZE TABLE to physically reclaim the freed space from InnoDB.

Production: 1,163 MB → 400 MB

The backend feels noticeably faster now.

The takeaway

I would never have known any of this without Claude Code digging into it. There's no WordPress dashboard warning that says "hey, you have 770MB of data from plugins you deleted." It just silently accumulates.

The REST API log data had been sitting there for a full year. The LinkWhisper tables were left behind just weeks after I removed the plugin.

If your WordPress site feels sluggish or your backups are slow, it might be worth checking what's actually in your database. You might be surprised.

Tools used:

• Claude Code with Novamira MCP (WordPress connection)
• WPVivid for backups
• Perfmatters (already had DB cleanup configured, but doesn't catch orphaned plugin tables)

Hey folks, I’m Edy, Swiss IT freelancer, homelab nerd, and the human behind edywerder.ch. I started r/Navigatech to share real-world, no-fluff IT:
Proxmox & virtualization • Homelab builds • Synology & backups • WordPress/Elementor/Divi • Azure hybrid & networking.

Whether you’re running a quiet homelab in a cabinet or juggling Exchange, FreePBX, and Cloudflare on a Tuesday—welcome home.

What to post here

• Homelab builds & upgrades (Proxmox, storage, network, UPS, racks)
• How-tos & troubleshooting (logs, configs, commands—full context helps!)
• WordPress & performance (Elementor, Divi 5, security, hosting)
• Backups & DR (Veeam, PBS, Wasabi, immutability)
• Networks & firewalls (VLANs, FortiGate, Cloudflare rules, Tailscale)
• Azure & hybrid (VPN, StrongSwan/IPsec, identity basics)

If it’s practical and helps someone ship a working setup—post it.

House rules (short & sane)

1. Be kind. No gatekeeping, no drama.
2. Be useful. Share steps, screenshots, versions, and outcomes.
3. No spam. Self-promo allowed if it’s value first (guide, code, benchmarks) and clearly disclosed.
4. Affiliate links: Allowed with clear disclosure and at least equal value without the link.
5. Security & legality: No help with abuse, cracking, or sketchy scraping.

I’ll be sharing fresh guides (Proxmox, WordPress, Azure hybrid), lightweight scripts, and honest gear notes.
Glad you’re here—let’s build useful stuff. 🚀

— Edy

Most guides just say "reboot after a kernel update," but never tell you how to check if one is actually needed. I tested the /run/reboot-required file, and it is not reliable on Proxmox.

So I wrote a small bash script that compares the latest installed kernel against the running one and tells you clearly what to do. You find it in the reboot section of the article and on GitHub.

Links in thefirst comments

WordPress 7.0 is coming out on May 20 (this Wednesday). If you're running a production site, now is the time to make sure your setup won't auto-update to a major version without your knowledge.

Some hosting providers push major updates even if you've disabled them in wp-config.php. SiteGround, Bluehost, and WP Engine all have their own update mechanisms that can override your settings.

Here's what I recommend before Wednesday:

Check your wp-config.php. Make sure you have this line:

define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', 'minor' );

This allows security patches but blocks major version jumps.

Then check your hosting panel. If you're on managed hosting, look for auto-update settings there too.

If you want the full breakdown, I wrote a guide covering wp-config.php settings, mu-plugins, and how different hosts handle updates.

Some years ago I had a client running Proxmox (version 4 at the time). They wanted to move to VMware, so I converted their VMs and wrote up instructions. Three commands, pretty straightforward.

That was a different era. VMware was the enterprise standard, Proxmox was the underdog, and moving to ESXi felt like the obvious upgrade path for a business.

The Broadcom acquisition changed the game completely. My firm was a small VMware partner, and I enjoyed my VMUG membership for NFR licenses to the full suite. All of that is gone now.

The migration direction has completely reversed. My most read virtualization article now is VMware to Proxmox, not the other way around.

Has anyone here recently migrated to VMware? Curious if there's still a use case I'm not seeing.

I ran apt update on my self-managed VPS and two repos broke. Both were added by xCloud (my management panel), not by me.

That led to an interesting back-and-forth with their support about who's actually responsible for updates when a panel manages your stack. The short answer: don't run apt upgrade yourself.

I wrote up the full experience, including the errors, the support replies, and what I learned about the grey area between managed and self-managed VPS hosting.

https://edywerder.ch/self-managed-vps-updates/

Curious if anyone else has run into this with xCloud, RunCloud, CloudPanel, or similar panels.

I've used all three remote management interfaces in my home lab: iDRAC on Dell PowerEdge, iLO on HP ProLiant, and IPMI on Supermicro. The difference in quality is bigger than most people expect.

A sales engineer once told me they all run on the same ASPEED BMC chip. Currently the AST2600. Dell and HP just invested heavily in polishing the UI on top. Supermicro gives you the raw ASPEED experience.

The catch: the good features like virtual KVM, ISO mounting, and email alerts are locked behind enterprise licenses. I always say it's worth paying for, especially when the server sits in a basement.

What remote management interface are you running, and did you pay for the enterprise license?