Ansible

The Goal The kids want Minecraft servers. Not one — six. Survival, Creative, Adventure, Minigames, Hardcore, and a modded Fabric server. I have three Ryzen 9 5900X Proxmox nodes with 64-128GB RAM each, so hardware isn’t the problem. The question was how to deploy and manage them without it becoming a second job. The Stack After researching management panels (Pterodactyl, Crafty, AMP, MCSManager), I landed on the simplest approach: Docker Compose with the itzg/minecraft-server image. It handles Paper builds, EULA acceptance, Aikar’s JVM flags, RCON, and graceful shutdown — all via environment variables. No panel needed. ...

The Problem My homelab had grown organically into a 9-node Proxmox 8 cluster on a flat 10.150.10.0/24 network. Six i5/i7 machines (pve001-006) with 16GB RAM each, plus three Ryzen 9 5900X machines (pve007-009) with 64-128GB RAM and dedicated GPUs. The old nodes were underpowered, the network was a mess, and managing it all was getting painful. It was time to consolidate. The Plan Rebuild the three Ryzen machines as a proper 3-node cluster with: ...

Step-by-step guide for adding a new Proxmox node to a cluster, including Ceph, Tailscale, and Ansible automation.

One of those satisfying days where a pile of “almost working” became a fully operational CI/CD pipeline. The goal: get GitHub Actions runners to test Ansible playbooks against real infrastructure over Tailscale VPN. The Problem I had Ansible playbooks managing Proxmox hosts, but no automated testing. Every change was a manual ansible-playbook --check from my laptop. I wanted PRs to automatically lint and dry-run against the real cluster before merge. ...