operations on /home/fel1x

Talos on Proxmox – Hybrid Kubernetes with AWS Burst Workers

xuanphuc.a1gv@gmail.com (Felix Hoang) — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This project automates independent development and production Talos Kubernetes environments on Proxmox using OpenTofu and GitHub Actions, with optional stateless AWS workers connected through KubeSpan. Each cluster runs its own Argo CD for GitOps application management, while Doppler and External Secrets supply credentials and persistent workloads stay on Proxmox.

Vault (Part 2): Secure On-Prem Automation with Ephemeral Runners and Tailscale

xuanphuc.a1gv@gmail.com (Felix Hoang) — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is Part 2 of the Hashicorp Vault series. Part 1 covered bootstrapping and configuring HashiCorp Vault (the one-time terraform-admin work) and the design goals for Zero Trust secrets management.

On-Premise 101 (Part 5): From Terraform VMs to a K8s Cluster with Ansible

xuanphuc.a1gv@gmail.com (Felix Hoang) — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

People are often scared to learn Kubernetes because it’s difficult to set up an environment to play around with. Sure, you can use a project like minikube to learn on your own, but running it on your laptop seems limited, and you may not get to experience all the awesome features Kubernetes offers (remember, it was born for high availability). Or, if you have money, you can use a managed Kubernetes cluster from one of the cloud providers. Often, they’ve abstracted away so many things under the hood that you only need to learn kubectl and you’re good to go.

On-Premise 101 (Part 4): Automating 12 VMs creation on Proxmox with Terraform

xuanphuc.a1gv@gmail.com (Felix Hoang) — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m the kind of person who will happily spend 10 hours building an automation script just to save 10 minutes of manual work every day. If that sounds like you, you’re in the right place.

On-Premise 101 (Part 3): My "Fearless" NAS Build with Virtualized TrueNAS, ZFS, and Cloud Backups

xuanphuc.a1gv@gmail.com (Felix Hoang) — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the previous parts of this series, we went from a single hand-me-down PC to a full 3-node cluster, and then we installed Proxmox as our hypervisor. We even managed to pass through a GPU to a VM for near-native performance.

On-Premise 101 (Part 2): Proxmox, the "Glue" for My Homelab

xuanphuc.a1gv@gmail.com (Felix Hoang) — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the previous part, we covered how I started playing around with my hand-me-down computer and then escalated to building a whole 3-node cluster. It’s been a 3-year journey, and there have been so many changes to the software stack I host. But no matter what, there’s one thing I’ve used consistently from beginning to end: Proxmox (Hypervisor). So before we dive into how I deploy my applications on Docker or Kubernetes, I’ll show you the glue that connects the hardware we just built to all the software we’re going to deploy.

On-Premise 101 (Part 1): Building a 3-Node Cluster

xuanphuc.a1gv@gmail.com (Felix Hoang) — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

You might have heard about the recent AWS outage that caused many services to go down. To think that half of the internet relies on a single service is crazy, even if it might be the best in its field. The engineers at AWS have done many things to prevent this, such as high availability, multi-region, zones, etc., but if a critical part of it still goes down, the whole thing goes down too. Therefore, if you don’t want to give all your money and trust to a single company, you might want to explore the on-premise option, which is self-hosting.

Automate provisioning Kubernetes cluster on Proxmox with Terraform + Ansible

xuanphuc.a1gv@gmail.com (Felix Hoang) — Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This project automates the provisioning and configuration of a RKE2 Kubernetes cluster on Proxmox using Terraform and Ansible.

Running Nintendo Switch Games on iPhone at 60FPS – Free, No Jailbreak Needed

xuanphuc.a1gv@gmail.com (Felix Hoang) — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you thought the biggest gaming news was the upcoming Switch 2, think again. The emulation community has made a breakthrough: you can now run Nintendo Switch games on your iPhone or iPad at buttery-smooth 60FPS—all offline, with no jailbreak, no shady VPNs, and zero sketchiness.

Automating Manga Translations: My Journey to a Seamless Reading Experience

xuanphuc.a1gv@gmail.com (Felix Hoang) — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Video demo:
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The Struggle: Why I Needed This
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Have you ever stumbled upon a manga so niche and obscure that it never gets an official English release? That was me—desperately trying to read intimate and underrated series that weren’t even on MangaDex, likely due to copyright issues.

My First Server Was Office Trash: A Self-Hosting Story

xuanphuc.a1gv@gmail.com (Felix Hoang) — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It all started with a computer my mom saved from the trash heap at her office. It was a standard HP Prodesk 600 G4—nothing special, and since I already had a PC and a laptop, I had no idea what to do with it. Just installing Windows on it felt like a waste. I knew it could be something more than just another desktop collecting dust.