Home Assistant, Node-RED, Raspberry Pis, ESP32 microcontrollers and custom projects all need a simple way of exchanging commands and status information. Rather than building direct connections between every device, MQTT provides a central messaging layer that everything can use. I…
It provides managed Gigabit Ethernet, VLAN support, a proper command-line interface and remote management over SSH. For learning networking or building a more advanced home network, switches like this still have plenty of life left in them. This guide covers…
Hyper-V is Microsoft’s native Type-1 hypervisor built directly into Windows. Whether you are building a local dev environment, testing new operating systems, or setting up dedicated homelab services, Hyper-V offers bare-metal virtualization performance without needing third-party hypervisors like VMware Workstation…
If your Hyper-V virtual machine is running fine in the background (e.g., you can still SSH into it), but Hyper-V Manager fails to connect or throws an error stating that the object was not found or deleted, the issue lies…
Node-RED Home Automation: Building Visual Automations for Realm Labs Node-RED has become one of the key automation tools behind Realm Labs. Home Assistant provides the central smart-home platform, MQTT provides a lightweight way for devices to communicate, and Node-RED sits…
Every growing homelab reaches a point where remembering IP addresses, port numbers, and service URLs becomes a chore. While browser bookmarks work, having a central, live dashboard that displays service health, resource metrics, and instant links makes managing your environment…
Whether you are spinning up lightweight microservices or running fully featured desktop environments, Proxmox VE provides flexible virtualization through Linux Containers (LXC) and Virtual Machines (VMs). This guide covers how to upload installation media, build VMs manually from ISOs, and…
Building a fast, reliable, and lightweight hypervisor using dedicated test hardware. Welcome to the Proxmox VE installation guide at Realm Labs! Everything here is built, tested, and documented from real experience. In this guide, we will walk through setting up…
Step 1: Storage & Folder Structure Step 2: Docker / Portainer Deployment When launching the container (via Portainer, Docker CLI, or Docker Compose), configure network and volume mappings as follows: Volume Mapping Map your NAS path directly to the internal…
I use Home Assistant to bring devices from different ecosystems into one place, and Tuya devices are a good example of why that is useful. Rather than relying entirely on the Smart Life or Tuya app, the device can be…
