RAG for Your Homelab Wiki: Answers That Cite Their Source
Turn your homelab wiki into a cited Q&A endpoint with dependency-free Node: retrieve-then-generate, every answer naming its source page, stale ones labelled.
Builda homelab.
Turn a used mini PC into your own private cloud — stream your movie library, automate your home, block ads on every device, keep your photos off Big Tech, and run your own ChatGPT-style AI from one quiet shelf. Every guide here was built on a live cluster, and every one tells you what broke on the way.
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two ways inThe Start Here roadmap remembers which steps you've finished.
The Lab
4-node Proxmox clusterFour HP EliteDesk 705 G4 mini PCs stacked flat and running Proxmox VE, cabled to an 8-port gigabit switch, with a 4-bay NAS for backup storage and a tower UPS protecting everything from power loss. Total idle power draw: ~55W.
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View all →A Proxmox Container Born, Configured, and Destroyed From Code
Prove your homelab's infrastructure code with a scratch container — OpenTofu creates it, Ansible configures it, a destroy removes it, production untouched.
Ansible for a Cluster You Built by Hand: Capture, Then Assert
Bring hand-configured Proxmox nodes under Ansible without changing them — capture live config into roles and make check mode your acceptance test.
Rebuild Your Homelab From Zero: What Survives a Total Loss
A Proxmox disaster-recovery walkthrough — what survives losing every node, the restore order that unblocks itself, and two commands that prove the rebuild.
Turn a Hand-Built Proxmox Cluster Into Code Without Breaking It
IaC guides assume an empty account. Here's the import-first approach for a Proxmox homelab already running things you cannot afford to lose.
Import a Live Proxmox Cluster Into OpenTofu With Zero Changes
Bring running Proxmox containers under OpenTofu without restarting one: import blocks, the generated-config cleanup, and a clean plan that becomes your drift detector.
Homelab Capacity Planning: What If a Node Dies Tonight?
I built a read-only simulator that answers whether a dead node's containers fit on the survivors — using the RAM they actually use, not the RAM you configured.
peira / PAY-rah / noun · Greek πεῖρα
the trial, the attempt — the word that grew into empirical.
This site is made by Peira Labs, and the name is a working description, not a decoration. Nothing on this shelf was set up from a spec sheet: every service got here by being tried on real hardware, watched while it broke, measured, and written down. The old Greek word for that loop — the attempt that produces knowledge — is exactly what the four little machines in my office do all day. The lab runs the trials; these field notes are the receipts.