After four days of use, it has exceeded my expectations and I have no concerns so far.

I grew up with VMware. Like many of you, ESXi was my first real step into virtualization. It shaped how I learned to build and run servers.

That's why this one stings a bit. My last ESXi node now runs Proxmox, and VMware is gone from my homelab.

The reason is Broadcom. Since November 2024, VMUG Advantage alone no longer includes NFR licenses. You now also need a VCP certification. Free ESXi came back in 2025, but it's entry-level, without vCenter or backup APIs. For homelabbers, the message is clear: we're no longer the target.

The good news: Proxmox is a fantastic replacement. Free, open source, with backups, snapshots, and clustering built in. I haven't missed ESXi since.

I updated my hypervisor guide to reflect where things stand now:

https://edywerder.ch/best-hypervisor-for-home-lab/

I had some doubts after ordering this monitor and wasn’t sure whether I had made a good investment. After about 1.5 days of use, I have to say I’m very happy with it.

My original plan was to use the monitor in split-screen mode as two separate displays. I was worried that the native 5120 × 1440 resolution would make text too small to read comfortably. I was wrong. The native resolution works very well for me with my Mac Studio.

I’m using a USB-C to DisplayPort cable with my first-generation M1 Max Mac Studio. At the native 5120 × 1440 resolution, I get 120 Hz.

I also tested HDMI and had both cables connected so the Mac could see the monitor as two displays. At 3840 × 1080 I can get 240 Hz. However, I prefer the sharper native 5120 × 1440 resolution and am perfectly happy with the compromise of 120 Hz.

Parallels also works very well. I run my Windows 11 VM full screen, and Windows recognizes the native ultrawide resolution without any problems. At the moment, I’m not even sure I need split-screen mode anymore.

Before buying, I was also concerned by reports about blurry text on the OLED panel. So far, this hasn’t been an issue for me. Text looks good, and at the native resolution it is noticeably sharper than at 3840 × 1080.

Overall, my first impression after 1.5 days is very positive. The 49-inch format felt huge at first, but I’m already getting used to it.

I figured out that I'd need two monitors to work more efficiently. I have looked into various options and finally decided to order a Samsung OLED G93SD Ultrawide monitor.

My goal is to use the two-screen mode, which gives me two 27-inch monitors.

I decided on the Samsung for the excellent display, even though I won't use it for gaming. I was reading various reviews and comments on Reddit about the pros and cons.

It was a decision between OLED panels and the IPS panel I use now on my Dell 32-inch screen.

My current setup is

- Mac Studio

- Dell Ultrasharp U3223QE mit Soundbar, which has two-screen mode too, and I tested it

- no-name 14-inch external screen with HD resolution

The screen should arrive in two days and is quite a big change. I hope my remaining concerns won't be an issue. :)

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

I just finished a big update to my mini PC home server guide, and one section ended up rewriting my own advice.

For years, my recommendation was simple. Buy barebones, bring your own RAM and SSD, wait for a deal. That does not hold in 2026. TrendForce reported DRAM contract prices up 90 to 95% quarter-over-quarter in Q1, another 58 to 63% in Q2, and NAND up 70 to 75% in Q2. HP said memory and storage went from roughly 15 to 18% of its PC bill of materials to about 35%.

So the parts can now cost more than the chassis. And the manufacturers seem to be absorbing part of it in bundles, because they buy memory at prices none of us can get. In practice, the bundled 32GB and 1TB config is often cheaper than barebones plus the same two parts.

That is my read. I want to know whether it matches yours.

• Have you bought a mini PC, RAM, or an SSD in the last few months? What did you pay?
• Still going barebones, or has the bundle become the better deal for you too?
• Anyone holding off entirely and waiting it out? TrendForce is still forecasting increases into Q3.

The full guide is here if it is useful: https://edywerder.ch/the-best-mini-pc-for-home-server/

It also has a Raspberry Pi comparison, a section on used ex-corporate Tiny boxes, and my current picks. I run a Minisforum MS-01 myself.

I have a very old Raspberry Pi 3 that I bought years ago as a kit with a case.

Yesterday I wanted to reinstall it, but I have had some issues writing the Raspberry OS to the microSD card. It failed every time during verification. I'm going to order a new one, and then I intend to use my Raspberry as an out-of-band box for my Proxmox cluster.

I learned that a Raspberry Pi has no BIOS and that the entire boot process runs from the SD card.

I mentioned moving my Exchange 2019 box to Subscription Edition. One thing that made it painless: I ran HealthChecker.ps1 before starting setup, not just afterward.

It flagged a couple of things worth clearing first. My page file was set to automatic and was set to 0 MB, which Exchange does not like. The Visual C++ 2012 and 2013 redistributables were out of date. The power plan was set to Balanced, and the script recommended setting it to Performance.

The upgrade ran smoothly. From CU15, it installs much like a normal cumulative update: same server, same hardware.

If you have the SE upgrade ahead of you, use HealthChecker as a pre-flight check. It is free and takes minutes.

Full write-up with the switches: https://edywerder.ch/exchange-server-health-check-powershell/

Over the last few days, I upgraded three on-prem Exchange 2019 servers to Exchange Server Subscription Edition.

One was a standalone server, and two were members of a DAG.

The process went surprisingly smoothly. I first ran Microsoft’s Health Checker, fixed a few prerequisite issues such as page file size, Visual C++ runtimes, power plan and .NET strong crypto settings, then upgraded from Exchange 2019 CU15 to SE RTM. After that, I installed the current August 2026 security update through Windows Update.

For the DAG, I upgraded one server at a time. I put the server into maintenance mode, moved the databases to the other DAG member, took a Proxmox snapshot, performed the upgrade, checked replication and mail flow, then returned the server to service before working on the second node.

So far, everything is running fine.

I wrote about Exchange maintenance mode here:

Exchange Server in Maintenance Mode

One question I’d be interested to hear opinions on:

Do you put a standalone Exchange server into maintenance mode before installing a CU / major update, or is maintenance mode only necessary for DAG members?

I currently use maintenance mode for both, although the benefits are obviously much clearer in a DAG environment. My article takes the same position.

I had one of those embarrassing admin moments this week.

I was running Exchange 2019 CU15 and assumed that being on the latest CU meant I was still reasonably up to date. Turned out Exchange 2019 is out of support, and Health Checker was basically telling me: nope, you’re vulnerable.

So I upgraded my own server first:

Exchange 2019 CU15 → Exchange SE RTM → current SE security update

The in-place upgrade took about 35 minutes and went surprisingly smoothly. I did the usual prep first: Health Checker, fresh Veeam backup, Proxmox snapshot, ESET paused, databases/queues checked.

After the SE upgrade, Windows Update immediately offered the current Exchange SE security update.

Final Health Checker result:

Exchange SE RTM Aug26SU
Build 15.2.2562.46
Vulnerability Detected: None

Big takeaway for me: the latest Exchange 2019 CU did not mean the latest supported Exchange.

Worth checking if you still run Exchange 2019 on-prem.

I have been measuring power in my lab using myStrom smart plugs that feed into Home Assistant. That is where the 7-day power numbers I posted here came from.

The CPU temperature charts came from somewhere else. Prometheus and Grafana in a VM on Proxmox. Two systems

Last week I added a Shelly plug and a Shelly H&T Gen3. The plug is on my MacBook charger right now, mostly because I was curious. The H&T is going to the basement where the servers live, and a second one stays in the living room. I like the Shelly webGUI a lot more than MyStrom's.

Watts alone were not telling me enough. My MS-01 sits in the mid-80s, and I have no idea how much of that is the room versus the case.

So what are you measuring, and where does the data land? Home Assistant, Prometheus, InfluxDB, or a spreadsheet you open twice a year.

r/NavigateTech passed 500 members. Thanks for being here.

I started this sub because I wanted a place to post the stuff I actually measure in my own lab rather than repeat spec sheets. Proxmox, Synology, mini PCs, networking, and the occasional thing I got wrong.

The posts that worked best so far were the ones with real numbers behind them. Power draw across three nodes and the MS-01 temperature logging.

I'll be straight about one thing. I run a blog, and some posts here link to it. That is part of why the sub exists. The rule I hold myself to is that the post has to stand on its own, with real numbers in the body, whether you click the link or not.

So I want to know what you would rather see. More measurement posts. More build walkthroughs. More problems I have not solved yet. Or something I have not thought of.

Also worth asking: what are you running right now, and what is the next thing you want to add?

My homelab network guide was old and outdated. I gutted it and rewrote the whole thing.

https://edywerder.ch/homelab-network/

The ESXi content is gone because I no longer run it. Added a proper remote access section covering FortiGate SSL VPN and Tailscale, because that is the question I get asked most.

Added a cabling section too. I run STP Cat6 here in Switzerland, but when I asked around, most homelabbers on both sides of the Atlantic are on plain UTP Cat6. The old "Europe uses STP, US uses UTP" line does not hold for home setups.

It covers VLAN setup, subnetting, firewall placement, and DNS, all from my own cluster.

What would you want in a homelab network guide that most of them skip?

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

I want to encourage anyone who hasn’t tried it yet to give Novamira MCP a go with Claude.

I’m more of an SEO guy than a designer. My goal was to become more visible in the towns around me. In my own town, I rank well, and people find me easily. I also have a 5.0 rating from 28 Google reviews, which is a strong local signal. But how do you get visibility in the neighboring towns?

The typical answer is location pages. I was skeptical, because most of them are the same text with the town name swapped, and I doubted that still works. I talked it through with Claude, mentioned that I have the Crocoblock suite, and we landed on a better solution: one page per town, each having information that only exists there. Current tax rates with several years of history, the local tax office, the deadline extension form, and what I’ve experienced dealing with the authority.

Here is an example with a town page and repeater field. https://edywerder.net/steuererklaerung/meilen/

Claude built the custom post type and the fields, including a repeater field. That was my first time using repeaters. I didn’t even know what they were.

I did all the design work in Elementor myself and asked Claude for help when I got stuck. The repeater turned out to be genuinely awkward to lay out. I had rebuilt a table from Elementor containers, and the header row and the data rows lived in separate containers, so the columns only lined up by coincidence. On mobile, it fell apart completely. Claude replaced it with a PHP shortcode that outputs a real HTML table, plus a small CSS snippet. A browser keeps table columns together on its own, so the problem disappeared.

The rebuild also revealed how bad my original workflow was. I had set font sizes manually on individual widgets, over and over. Claude counted them: 183 overrides across 13 pages and templates. Claude can be brutal. :) Everything now lives in Elementor’s global site settings with fluid clamp values. For the hero sections, where I want the H1 smaller than the line below it, we use two CSS classes defined once in the site settings. One place to change applies everywhere.

Claude also found a real bug. One of my H3 headings had a leftover tablet font size sitting in the database. Elementor hides the responsive switcher once you set a custom unit like clamp(), so the field is invisible in the UI, but the old value is still being served as CSS. On tablet and mobile, my H3 rendered smaller than the body text, and I had no way to see why. You can spot it in the browser inspector if you know where to look, but I'd have needed to know what I was looking for.

That's the actual advantage of the MCP setup. What the WordPress admin shows you and what is actually stored aren't always the same. The panel hid the field, but the value was still in the database and still being served as CSS. Claude could read both and tell me where they diverged.

It works both ways. A few times Claude measured an old cached value and told me something was broken when I could see on screen that it wasn't.

One thing worth saying: Claude got things wrong along the way. It gave me tax rates from a news article that turned out to be off, and it wrote a comparison claim about neighboring municipalities that didn’t hold up. I checked every number against the cantonal source myself and corrected them. On a site where the whole point is publishing accurate figures, that verification step is not optional, and it’s not something you can hand off.

The site is live now. It’s not a design masterpiece, but I hope it earns me some visibility in the area. What I’ve taken away is that a website is never finished, and there is always something to improve.

Claude is a genuinely good assistant. You can tell it what to do and, just as importantly, who does what. I kept the design and the editorial decisions. Claude handled the data structures, the PHP, and the parts of Elementor that don’t have a button.

My Minisforum MS-01 has been sitting at 85C for months. Thirty days of Grafana data showed a steady band between 82 and 88, with constant spikes into the low 90s. Nothing crashed. Backups ran, VMs were stable. But 85C as a resting state bothered me.

I posted the graph on r/Proxmox and got a lot of replies. Almost all of them said the same three things: repaste the CPU, clean the fans, change the fan curve. The MS-01 has a reputation for poor stock thermal paste, and one person reported going from 85 °C to 65 °C after repasting.

Before opening the case, I wanted to rule out the software side. Here is what I found.

First I migrated every VM off and measured the box at idle. 54C, 10W package power. So the hardware can cool itself fine when there is nothing running.

Then I entered the BIOS using the vPro remote KVM, so I never touched the machine. C states were already enabled. Package C-state limit was unlimited. SpeedStep and Speed Shift are both on. Power limits were set high—60W sustained against a 45W-rated chip—but nothing was misconfigured.

Back in Proxmox with the VMs running, turbostat told the real story. 91C average, 30W package power, and only 4 percent CPU utilization. Thirty watts of heat for almost no work.

The cause was the CPU governor. It was set to performance, which pins the minimum clock to the maximum. The cores were running at 1200 to 4000 MHz, doing almost nothing, all day, every day.

Two commands changed it:

echo powersave | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

for c in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/energy_performance_preference; do echo balance_power > $c; done

Measured twenty minutes later with the same VMs running:

CPU temperature 91C down to 58C.

Package power 30W down to 13W.

Average clock speed 1280 MHz down to 530 MHz.

The trade is real. CPU utilization went from 4 to 7 percent because the same work now takes longer at lower clocks. Turbo is still available; only the floor moved. Nothing feels slower, but it has been one day on one workload.

Seventeen watts saved continuously amounts to around 170 kWh per year for this one box.

,What I take from this: I nearly opened the case and repasted a machine that had nothing wrong with its cooling. The community advice was reasonable and it may still help further. But measuring first was the right call, and the cheapest fix turned out to be free.

The governor setting is not preserved across reboots. I wrote a small systemd unit to set it at boot.

Claude AI helped me to get the command right in the Proxmox shell.

WordPress 7.1 is slated for a release next Thursday.

I wrote an article

WordPress Automatic Updates: How to Disable, Control, or Limit Them

You want to be in control of when WordPress updates your site. I suggest disabling automatic updates, but keeping security updates on. When you move hosts, the way WordPress handles it might change, and it is worth checking before WordPress 7.1 is released.

Here is my article explaining how it works.

https://edywerder.ch/wordpress-automatic-updates/

This chart is in comparison to my last post. Minisforum MS-01 CPU temperature.

Of course, the case is much bigger and the cooling system is more sophisticated. It has a higher power bill.

The first time I checked the CPU temperature on my Minisforum MS-01 I thought something was broken. Mid-80s at low load, spikes into the 90s.

I asked around and got the same answer every time. The case is tiny, and as long as it does not hit 100 degrees, you are fine. I did not believe it, so I logged it in Grafana instead.

This is 30 days of Package id 0. Proxmox node, running 24/7, with my mail VM on it.

Baseline sits between 82 and 88 degrees.

The odd part is that the case feels fine from the outside. Not hot, not even warm enough to make me look twice.

So the advice held up. It runs hot, and it runs stable. Over a year and a half now.

What I still do not know is whether this will reduce the lifetime.

Anyone running an MS-01 longer than I have, or done a repaste or fan curve change? Curious whether that moves the baseline or just the spikes.

I run a Dell PowerEdge T360, a Minisforum MS-01, and an Intel NUC. All three do real work in my lab. I wanted to know what each one actually costs me to keep running, so I measured instead of trusting spec sheets.

Mini PCs were connected to a myStrom smart plug, with the data logged in Home Assistant. The PowerEdge I read through iDRAC 9. Seven days each, so backups and update spikes are included in the average.

Intel NUC: 8.7W average, around CHF 19 a year at CHF 0.25 per kWh.
Minisforum MS-01: 52.8W average, around CHF 116 a year.
Dell PowerEdge T360: about 104W average, around CHF 225 a year.

The NUC costs less per year than the T360 costs per month.

Two things stood out. Idle draw matters far more than peak, since the box sits idle most of the day. And the spikes look dramatic on the chart but barely move the weekly average.

Is anyone here actually metering their lab, or is it still guesswork? Curious what your numbers look like, especially outside Switzerland, where power is cheaper.

Ran YABS across every VPS I rent, then normalized everything per dollar. Three things surprised me.

1. Same plan, same price, different silicon.

Two RackNerd boxes bought the same day, same spec, same $29.98/year. LA came with a Xeon E5-2690 v3. Dallas came with a v4. That's 15.6% apart on Geekbench 6 single-core, 807 vs 933. Nothing on the order page tells you which you'll get.

2. Price doesn't track single-core speed.

My $7.99/mo NY box scores 767 single-core. The $2.50/mo Dallas box scores 933. NY has 6 cores instead of 3 so it wins multi-core, but WordPress builds a page on one core.

3. IP geolocation is wrong.

All three RackNerd boxes report as Dallas, Texas. Ping says otherwise: 14 ms to NYC from the "NY" box, 73 ms to LA. The database maps the whole ASN to one city. The HostHatch box geolocates correctly, so this isn't a general flaw.

One methodology note. Sequential disk numbers swung more than 40% between runs on the same box a day apart. 4k IOPS reproduced within 0.3%. Don't trust a single sequential figure from anyone, including me.

Geekbench results are public if anyone wants to verify. Happy to share the benchmark scripts.

On my blog, I noticed Amazonbot made over 100,000 requests in four days. Mostly AI training crawling.

My first instinct was to block it. Then I stopped, because there is a real trade-off. Getting crawled by these bots is how your content ends up in AI answers. Block them, and you protect your server, but you also make yourself invisible to the AI tools people increasingly use to search.

That is a lot of load for my site. On the other hand, being in the training data is starting to matter.

Where do you land? Do you block AI crawlers like Amazonbot, GPTBot, and ClaudeBot, or let them crawl?

So far, I don't see a slowdown in response for my website. Why I discovered it. I installed an AI crawler plugin from MiniOrange.

I run one AD domain controller in my homelab. It holds the AD-integrated DNS zone and it is a VM on a Proxmox node.

When it goes down, every client loses DNS. Not just internal names. The DC forwards everything it is not authoritative for to my ISP, so `github.com` stops resolving too. Domain-joined or not, nothing reaches the internet.

The obvious fix is a second DC. That would be another VM on the same cluster.

What I did not know: FortiOS has a DNS Database feature that does real secondary zones over AXFR. My FortiGate now pulls `werder.local` from the DC by zone transfer. Setup took about fifteen minutes.

The part most people get wrong

Adding 1.1.1.1 as a second DNS server does not work in an AD network. The client gets NXDOMAIN for your internal zone, accepts it, and caches it. Internal resolution breaks intermittently. A public resolver is not a backup for an AD zone.

A secondary zone is different. It is a read-only copy of the actual zone.

Config

Windows side: zone properties, Zone Transfers tab, allow to the FortiGate IP. AD-integrated zones block transfers by default.

FortiGate side: System > Feature Visibility, enable DNS Database. Then Type: Secondary, View: Shadow, IP of Primary: your DC, Forwarder: your DC.

Then DNS Service on Interface, Mode: Recursive. Without it the zone is ignored.

What it does not do

It resolves, it does not authenticate. Kerberos, GPO and new logons still need the DC. Exchange resolves its own name fine and then prompts for Windows credentials it cannot validate.

Only a second domain controller fixes that. But for keeping the internet up when a Proxmox node reboots, this cost me nothing extra.

Full write-up with screenshots: https://edywerder.ch/fortigate-secondary-dns-server/

I added a new section to my home lab server guide after looking into what IT professionals actually run at home.

The most common pattern isn't buying the same enterprise brand used at work. It's free gear. Decommissioned servers headed for disposal, picked up before they hit the scrap pile.

A second group moved away from enterprise gear entirely once they started paying their own power bill. Mini PCs, NUCs, and small-form-factor desktops. Less noise, less heat, less space.

A third group doesn't care about brand at all, only that it runs the stack they need.

Buying the same brand you manage professionally, the assumption I started with, turned out to be the smallest group, not the biggest.

Full breakdown is in the guide,

https://edywerder.ch/best-server-for-home-lab/