Homelab on Luther Monson

Rescuing a Windows Dynamic Disk Over USB with WSL2 and USB/IP

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 13:15:00 -0700

I pulled a 1 TB NVMe out of an old Windows box, dropped it in a USB enclosure and plugged it in. Windows showed nothing. No drive letter, no “initialize this disk” prompt, nothing in Explorer. Disk Management listed it as Invalid. The enclosure’s booklet said to “bring the disk online”, which silently did nothing. The data was completely intact. Windows was refusing on policy grounds, not because anything was broken. Getting it back meant going around the Windows storage stack entirely. I handed the raw USB device to a Linux kernel that doesn’t share Windows’ opinions.

Cloud-Init ISOs in Pure Go with go-proxmox

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:20:00 -0700

Proxmox’s built-in cloud-init support is fine for the basics: a user, an SSH key, an IP config. It falls apart the second you want your own user-data, vendor-data or a real network-config. The GUI and the ci* options only expose a handful of fields. The escape hatch is cicustom pointing at snippet files, and that means getting files onto the Proxmox host’s filesystem first. The usual alternative is building a nocloud ISO yourself with genisoimage or mkisofs. That means a system dependency on whatever machine runs your automation. You get a different package name on every OS and a subprocess to babysit.

Waiting on Proxmox: UPIDs, Tasks and WaitFor in Go

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 16:42:00 -0700

If you start automating Proxmox VE through the API, one thing trips you up first. Almost nothing you ask it to do is finished when the HTTP call returns. Start a VM, clone a template, download an ISO to storage, delete a disk… the response is a single string that looks like a typo. The actual work is happening in a worker process on the node. If your next call depends on that work being done, you have to go find out when it’s done.