I have done a lot of exciting things this year, but this is the first one that has made my heart race again.

I turned my old Lenovo ThinkPad X1 into a hypervisor running Proxmox. For those who do not know the term, think of it as a server that runs servers. For the first time in a long while I spent more than 10 continuous hours on a hobby project and did not notice.

I went in thinking the install was the hard part. It was NOT! The real learning was everything after: carving the disk into a root volume and a thin pool so VMs get snapshots for free, giving the host two network paths with wireless as the fallback, and building a NAT bridge so guests share the host's connection while a second isolated bridge stays walled off for a security lab.

Remote access was its own lesson. ZeroTier on the host got me in from anywhere, and the host became the jump box into every VM behind it. Then key-only SSH everywhere, no passwords left on.

The first VM is now a Debian box running Docker, hosting a staging environment for an ISP billing system and CRM I am building, with a Cloudflare Tunnel in front so nothing is exposed directly.

Next is an ACS for TR-069 for remote network router/ONU management, then the lab. Case study to follow.