Homelab

Mining ETH in a homelab, and the day it stopped being about mining

The goal was to make idle hardware pay the electricity bill. The route ran through IOMMU passthrough into a Windows VM, then out again into containers, and what survived the mining was the scheduling pattern underneath it. I never measured whether it paid.

Five dollars a month instead of an open port

The honest reason the homelab exists. Port forwarding accumulates: one internet-reachable service per forward, several of them on hardware nobody will patch. A 5 USD virtual server does not make the listener disappear - it moves it somewhere you control.