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hey, i’m

Trevor Botha

Tech nerd, gamer, musician and motorhead.

I fix IT for a living and break my homelab for fun. This is where I write up what I build, break and fix.

Read the blog Download résumé
trevor@homelab:~$ whoami
Trevor Botha: IT support specialist and homelabber. Durban, South Africa.
trevor@homelab:~$ uptime
up 15+ years in IT, load average: networks, servers, homelab
trevor@homelab:~$ cat now.txt
Wiring Claude into Paperless-ngx
Moving everything public behind a Cloudflare Tunnel
Building the 2007 STI, one part at a time
trevor@homelab:~$ ls -t ~/blog | head -3
A Free, Self-Hosted CrowdSec Dashboard for NPMPlus (and the Bug It Uncovered)
Floyd Rose Setup: What Happens When a String Change Goes Sideways
Moving WordPress from cPanel to Self-Hosted Docker (and Getting Blocked by My Own CrowdSec)
trevor@homelab:~$

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Who I am and what I do

I've been into tech since high school. My first job was internal IT at a small company in my hometown, where I learned to build PCs, run network cabling and set up servers. The town didn't have many IT companies, so we looked after outside clients too.

A few years later I started my own company, National Technology Solutions (NTS). My work covers Microsoft 365, networking, VoIP, endpoints and websites.

Gaming came before computers. I put 200+ hours into Final Fantasy VIII and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. I picked up guitar at about 20, but I've been into metal since my teens. And as if guitars and computers weren't expensive enough, I've been hooked on Subarus since 2021. The current project is a black 2007 Impreza WRX STI.

  1. Early daysInternal IT, hometownBuilding PCs, running cabling and setting up servers, plus outside clients because the town had so few IT companies.
  2. 2013Started NTSNational Technology Solutions: my own IT company.
  3. 2022Remote support for US clientsSupport Specialist at a US MSP: ConnectWise, N-able N-central, Meraki, Microsoft 365 and 3CX, alongside onsite techs.

Skills

Networking

Routers, firewalls and the links between sites.

  • MikroTik RouterOS
  • WireGuard site-to-site
  • Cisco Meraki
  • Ubiquiti
  • VLANs
  • multi-WAN

Servers & virtualisation

Where most of my evenings go.

  • Proxmox VE
  • Proxmox Backup Server
  • TrueNAS SCALE
  • ZFS
  • Debian
  • LXC
  • Docker
  • Windows Server

Microsoft 365 & identity

Tenants for small businesses, end to end.

  • Microsoft 365
  • Entra ID
  • Exchange Online
  • Intune basics
  • M365 migrations

Security & access

Closing front doors before someone else finds them.

  • Cloudflare Tunnel
  • Zero Trust Access
  • CrowdSec
  • reverse proxies
  • Vaultwarden
  • 2FA everywhere

MSP tooling

The tools I work in every day.

  • N-able N-central
  • ConnectWise PSA
  • ITFlow
  • 3CX VoIP
  • remote support
  • documentation

Web & automation

Sites, plugins and agents.

  • WordPress themes and plugins
  • PHP
  • n8n
  • Ollama
  • Claude and MCP agents

Certifications

  • CompTIA A+
  • 3CX Certified

The homelab

One Proxmox node, TrueNAS for storage, and a container per job. The hosts are named after EVE Online ships. Most posts on this blog started here.

HostRoleRuns
sabre Edge Cloudflare Tunnel, reverse proxy, CrowdSec
proteus Monitoring Uptime Kuma, Beszel, ntfy, Vaultwarden
archon Business apps Ticketing, remote access (Guacamole)
talos Personal tools openGym, Mealie
gnosis AI & GPU Ollama, Paperless-ngx, Immich, Whisper
revelation Websites WordPress, including this one

Contact me

Questions about a post, a project idea or anything else: send a message and it lands in my inbox.