The main concern about an unlevel floor is why is it unlevel? If you can figure out the “why”, that will tell you if it’s easily fixable or if it will potentially get worse.

How hard it is to investigate depends on how accessible the underside of the floor is. It’s going to be pretty hard to tell from the top side without ripping off the tile first.

If the room has a crawlspace or basement underneath and you feel like playing detective, get a bubble level and go check the joists and beams in the vicinity. Work downhill until the slope stops. That will give you a general area of the source of the problem.

There could be a variety of causes, some of which are obvious, some not as much.

Yikes! Don’t bother trying to patch it. That floor is a disaster and needs to be completely removed and reinstalled. As at least one other commenter mentioned, the tiles should be staggered and have room around the edges for expansion. The reason those popped up is because there are no gaps for expansion around the edge of the room. Also, they did a really sloppy mortar job. I’m not even sure they used the right mortar but it’s hard to tell from just the photos.

Part of the challenge is that most of the rainwater doesn’t originate from the exterior in the area where I’m working.

When they poured the front porch (which is actually towards the rear of the house from the street since the house sits sideways on the lot), they didn’t backfill it correctly. As a result, there’s a nice little spot next to the foundation, under the front walkway, where water that gets through cracks in the walkway gets funneled downhill under the walkway and front porch, through the exterior wall, and into the corner where I’m digging.

There’s a small hole in the wall on the other side of this crawlspace (see photo). When I first discovered it I looked in and could see the front porch slab above it. It’s big enough inside that if the hole were bigger I could probably crawl into it.

Long term, the whole walkway needs to be ripped out, backfilled, and replaced. But that’s going to be $$$ so it will be a few years before I can do that.

That would be a huge job. I think it would probably pay off more if the ground was flat and standing water was a greater risk. Around here it’s very hilly and the soil is not that absorbent.

Water runs down hill. It’s just a question of making sure it runs away from the house which it now does 99% of the time.

In this situation it’s not necessarily that it’s the “right” or “wrong” device. The better question is, “does it meet your needs?” There are pros and cons to running each service in its own VM. One of the cons is the overhead consumed by the VM OS. Sometimes that’s a necessary sacrifice.

Some of the advantages of running a system like Proxmox are that it’s easily scalable and you’re not locked into specific hardware. If your current Beelink doesn’t prove to be enough, you can just add another one to the cluster or add a different host and Proxmox doesn’t care what it is.

TLDR: it’s adequate until it’s not. When it’s not, it’s an easy fix.

Yeah, with something that size you’re pretty much limited to containers.

Edit: Which is totally fine, OP. Self hosting is an opportunity to learn and your setup can be easily changed as your needs change over time.

I use one VM per service. WAN facing services, of which I only have a couple, are on a separate DMZ subnet and are firewalled off from the LAN.

It’s probably little overkill for a self hosted setup but I have enough server resources, experience, and paranoia to support it.

Sounds like you’ve got a good high level plan so far. A few things to consider:

1.) Are you wanting to maintain the same amount of natural light? High quality windows and doors will cost more up front but save you a bundle in energy costs down the road. If you’re going to replace those, nows the time to do it.

2.) What do you plan to do for HVAC? I had a similar room that I ducted to the main unit. It was adequate but if I had kept the house, I probably would have installed a mini-split instead.

Yep. Very powerful and cost effective routers. Way too easy to screw something up if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I want to make sure I understand your goal correctly. Here’s what I’m getting.

1. You have a wire guard connection that you want to use for outbound traffic from your local LAN.
2. You have a Debian box that serves at the client in this situation.

Here’s the part where I’m a little fuzzy

3. You want to connect to your local LAN using another wire guard connection and have WAN requests routed from clients connecting to your LAN (via wire guard) out the wire guard connection mentioned in #1.

Did I get any part of that wrong?

Edit: NVM. I saw your response to another comment that sounds like this is exactly what you want.

This should be achievable via routing. I actually do the same thing. The main difference is all the work is done on my router which handles both wire guard connections and routing.

At the minimim you’re going to need:

• A NAT rule on your local router to port forward incoming wire guard requests on the WAN to your Debian box. **Assuming the Debian box is also the wire guard server.
• An iptables DSTNAT rule on your Debian box to route local traffic to the LAN gateway.
• An iptables DSTNAT rule on your Debian box to route outbound WAN traffic that does NOT originate from your Debian box to the gateway at the other end of the outbound wire guard connection.

Yes. I rarely have any sync issues.

Personal finance software is tough. It’s costly to develop, even with a very limited feature set. Automatic transaction downloads are a must if you want widespread adoption and that has its own set of complications.

I still use Quicken – which doesn’t get anyone excited since it’s still a Windows (and Mac) desktop app built on an ancient codebase – but I’m a power user and have yet to find an adequate replacement. It’s not sexy but it does the job. I’m more the exception than the rule. The average user probably doesn’t need or care about the same features that I do.

Oddly enough, one of its redeeming qualities is that it runs quite well on Linux through Wine.

Go with solid core wood doors for interior. They’re a lot more expensive than hollow core and more work to install (they usually come unfinished and without pre-drilled holes) but they will last decades, are much better at sound dampening, and can be repainted or re-stained.

My advice is avoid tape backups. The cost, risk of media degredation, and management overhead make them not worth it, especially for a homelab.

Also, restoring an entire VM is almost easier than recovering a single file, just because of the sequential nature of reading data from a tape. Data recoveries are pretty slow in general.

I backup to an external hard drive with regular copies to iDrive S3. Been doing it that way for a number of years with no problems.

I have a rule that “Nothing will be automated that cannot be manually overridden.”

Well, actually it’s my wife’s rule but it’s a good rule nonetheless. As a result, there’s a big panel full of relays in the basement that is the “last mile” for anything climate control or security related.

There have been a few times when it’s been handy. Like when the exhaust fan isn’t working and I don’t want to debug the ESP32 controller today so I just flip it over to “Manual”.

Got permission from my [uphill] neighbor to install a catch basin underneath one of her downspouts that always floods our yard when it rains. Dug a shallow trench about 20ft. to an existing storm drain and tied it in.

No more flooding my yard.

Even if your BIL lives a long way away, you can always call him for advice. I’m pretty good with doing most of my own electrical work but if I have a question I just call my dad since he’s a retired master electrician. He can usually tell me what I need to know without even looking at the job.

I would advise against it. Separation of concerns isn’t important until it is. If your host server is unavailable for any reason, now EVERYTHING is unavailable. Having your server go down is bad. Being unable to browse the internet when your host is down and you’re trying to figure out why is worse.

There are also risks involved in running your firewall on the same host as all your other VM’s without adding a lot of complex network configurations.

This week’s project is improving the heat transfer from our massive double sided fireplace. It has a steel firebox with a very basic heat exchanger. Airflow through the heat exchanger is poor. I’m adding a blower in the basement to draw air from a nearby register and force it up over the firebox, out the vents on top.

Basically trying to squeeze every single bit of efficiency possible out of a very inefficient heat source since I don’t currently have the time or money to install an insert.

Will there be other drains from the same room tied in? Your drawing should work but it may need to be altered a little if there’s a toilet on the same branch.