Daniel Thiele IT - daniel@dproject.de

This homelab demonstrates how to build and expand a VMware-based Windows domain environment with Active Directory, virtual and physical clients, Group Policy, backup and recovery, printer deployment, and remote power management.   Because the project is too large for a single article, I divided it into smaller PDF documents. Each document covers one milestone of the setup and contains the practical steps needed to reproduce it. I will later add to this project and expand on it with Azure, MS365 and more. That will be updated here. 0 – ARES ESXi and Veeam Preparation Preparing the physical ARES computer for VMware ESXi, creating a Veeam backup, and making sure the existing Windows installation can be restored safely as aVM. 0 ARES_ESXi_Veeam_Preparation_Tutorial.pdf   1 – Restore the Windows VM on ESXi Creating a virtual machine on ESXi and restoring the previous Windows system from the Veeam backup. 1 ARES_ESXi_Windows_VM_Restore   2 – Set Up the vSwitch, Port Groups, and...

  CUPS is the Linux printer daemon. The original goal sounded simple: the Brother printer already worked through CUPS and I set that up as part of my LPIC 1 studies , so scanning should also be available from the network. In practice, the printer and scanner parts of a multifunction device are handled by different Linux subsystems. Printing was already solved through CUPS as part of LPIC 1. Scanning required a separate path through SANE, the Brother scanner backend, and finally a way to expose the scanner to Windows clients without installing scanner software on every machine. The device in question was a Brother DCP-7055 connected by USB to the Ubuntu VM  Test which was also my printer server . The working CUPS printer queue was named brother7055 , and printing was already functional. The Ubuntu host had the management LAN address 192.168.10.123 , and later we also confirmed that it had a second address, 192.168.178.123 . The network design matters here. VLAN 10 is the manag...

I don't have much to say. I don't have much time. Exam was yesterday. Today started my internship at Kreis Gütersloh IT department.

How I Used ChatGPT and Codex to Build a Monitored Backup Workflow — and What That Taught Me About Automation   What started as a simple backup task turned into something much more interesting. Yes, the technical goal mattered: I wanted my always-on Windows system Aether to run a daily backup of my local Google Drive mirror to Athena , my always-on server, and I wanted LibreNMS to send me an email if that backup failed. The final design ended up being a clean daily 22:00 FreeFileSync Update job, wrapped in PowerShell, logged into the Windows Application log, forwarded through NXLog, and monitored by LibreNMS with a critical alert rule called Aether Backup Failed . But the real story was not just the backup.  The real story and experiment was what happened when I tried to build that workflow with AI automation! This project became a very practical lesson in what AI is already good at, what it is bad at, and what “computer use” actually means once you leave neat terminal comman...

From Firewall to Mini-SOC   How I Used ChatGPT and Codex to Add a New Security Layer to My Homelab I already had a structured lab with segmentation, remote access, and a clear network design. What I wanted next was to add another layer of security : not another layer of blocking, but another layer of visibility . I am also heading toward the Security+ exam , so this project fit perfectly into what I want to learn anyway: not just how to install tools, but how to think about monitoring, visibility, architecture, and controlled rollout.  The target was a small but real detection pipeline: OPNsense firewall → Suricata intrusion detection → Syslog forwarding → Wazuh SIEM → searchable alerts in a dashboard This is the kind of chain you would find, in much larger form, in a Security Operations Center , usually shortened to SOC . A Security Operations Center is the part of an organization that watches security events, reviews alerts, and investigates suspicious activity. In a larg...

A troubleshooting tour through Linux bridges, Proxmox vmbr interfaces, and the moment “drops” stopped meaning “packet loss”.   This post is a real troubleshooting walkthrough from my homelab. It all started when I decided to actually follow up on that red light flashing on the mini PC port every few seconds. I knew it meant something like package drop, especially since Network+, but I finally took the time to check into that because it became more frequent (although I did not experience any noticeable problems). I’m running Proxmox on a host called Athena and noticed scary-looking dropped packet counters on a Linux bridge ( vmbr0 ). What followed was a surprisingly deep dive into how Proxmox networking works under the hood: Linux bridges, bridge netfilter, per-interface counters, and a set of proprietary Layer-2 frames emitted by my FritzBox that Linux mostly ignores (but still counts as “dropped”). I’m keeping this conversational and command-heavy, because this got solved th...

    So, that means I am now a certified Linux Administrator... I need to rest now. My brain is braining.... Honestly, I can say: with Codex installed recently, coding is now vibe coding . I also can say I understand what the AI does—well, at least 80% of it—which is great actually, but I want to do more with it. What we need is a secure, compliant, and stable “coworker” who can do useful stuff. So when I find the time, I will step away from OpenAI and see what I can do locally, without relying on megacorps, and what agents can do that would help me organize my paperwork, not hallucinate, and all that stuff. As someone who worked in the design field and got replaced by ai that was trained on all the images anyone ever posted on the internet, I can tell you the big tech companies steal all your data. You cannot trust them. So if you don't care, fine. If you have to work with lots of personal data, need to fulfill compliance rules and regulations, and want to make sure it does wh...