hey, i'm

Trevor Botha

Tech nerd, gamer, musician and motorhead!

Who I am and what I do

My career

I’ve been passionate about technology since my high school years. I started my career at a small company in my hometown, doing internal IT where I learned to build computers, run network cabling, and even setup servers.
A couple years later, I started my own IT company – National Technology Solutions – and the rest, as they say, is history.

My hobbies

As you can guess, I started gaming even before I got into computers and the tech world. I still remember putting 200+ hours into games such as Final Fantasy VIII, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, and so on. Ah, the good old days. I strated playing guitar when I was around 20, but have been into the metal scene since my teenage days. As if guitars and computers were not expensive enough, I developed a serious liking for cars – specifically Subarus – at the end of 2021.

Skills

Networking & Firewalls

Mikrotik, Cisco Meraki

Recently I have been mostly working with Mikrotik and Cisco Meraki firewalls. I have a lot of experience with Ubiquiti as well. For switching, I have mostly dealt with HP, Netgear and TP-Link switches, but I have setup a few Cisco CLI switches and access points. I have managed networks with multiple VLANs and WAN interfaces.

Windows/Linux OS and Servers

All Windows versions, mostly Debian for Linux

I have worked with Windows Server since my first IT job. In my current position, I am working more and more with Azure AD. As for Linux, I am pretty proficient with Debian. My entire home lab is pretty much setup on Debian, using Proxmox VE as my virtualization platform. I have setup some webservers using CentOS as well.

Troubleshooting

I'm a very efficient Googler

I believe I am pretty decent at troubleshooting issues by myself. I always try to understand how the system works, front to back. This way when we run into issues I find it pretty easy to identify where to look for the cause of the issue. learning Linux by myself has also turned me into a pretty efficient Googler.

Customer Service

Over 13 years of customer facing experience

I have been working with customers since my first job. Even with my first IT position being internal support for the company, we still had some outside clients as our hometown did not have many IT companies. I quite enjoy helping people and it brings me joy when we can “save the day” and ensure our customers can continue working.

Where you can find me and my content

Socials

Blogs and other posts

Tech Related Posts

Here you can view blog posts and projects that relate to tech and my career.

Why Invoice Ninja Kept Logging Me Out — And How CrowdSec Was the Culprit

Trevor March 8, 2026 No Comments

I set up Invoice Ninja for my business invoicing needs. After logging in, refreshing the page would immediately kick me back to the login screen. After a deep troubleshooting session, the culprit turned out to be a CrowdSec AppSec rule designed for Langflow AI — misfiring on Invoice Ninja’s /api/v1/refresh endpoint. Here’s exactly how I found it and fixed it

Migrating from Nginx Proxy Manager to NPMPlus with CrowdSec: A Complete Walkthrough

Trevor March 7, 2026 1 Comment

I replaced my standard Nginx Proxy Manager instance with NPMPlus (an enhanced fork) and integrated CrowdSec for automated threat detection and blocking — including Cloudflare Turnstile captcha challenges. The whole stack runs in Docker, managed via Dockge, and sits behind itself as a reverse proxy. Here’s exactly how I did it, including the gotchas I hit along the way

3-2-1 and Then Some: How I Back Up My Entire Home Lab

Trevor February 28, 2026 No Comments

A comprehensive breakdown of my homelab backup architecture, built around the “3-2-1” principle. The strategy utilizes TrueNAS as the central hub, employing ZFS snapshots for immediate disaster recovery, Rsync to a secondary PC for local hardware redundancy, and Proxmox Backup Server for managing VM/LXC backups. Finally, all critical datasets and backups are automatically synced offsite to Storj, ensuring the entire network is well protected against failure

Your Backups Need a Backup: Syncing PBS to Storj for Offsite Peace of Mind

Trevor February 25, 2026 No Comments

A guide to implementing offsite homelab backups by syncing a local Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) directly to Storj’s decentralized S3-compatible cloud storage. Taking advantage of PBS’s native S3 support and Storj’s free egress, the author explains how to configure S3 endpoints with path-style access, create a remote datastore, and set up a pull-based sync job to automatically upload deduplicated and doubly-encrypted backups every night.

Supercharge Your Photo Library: Hosting Immich on Proxmox LXC with TrueNAS & NVIDIA

Trevor February 21, 2026 No Comments

A technical walkthrough on self-hosting the Immich photo library inside a lightweight, unprivileged Proxmox LXC container. It covers securely mapping a TrueNAS NFS share to bypass unprivileged LXC permission errors, passing through an NVIDIA GPU (GTX 1080ti) to the container, and using Dockge for deployment. The result is a highly secure, hardware-accelerated photo backup system with blazing-fast video transcoding and AI facial recognition.

From Wasted Space to Unified Storage

Trevor February 21, 2026 No Comments

How to repurpose an underutilized bare-metal backup machine into a TrueNAS Scale NAS to create unified, shared storage. To keep backup capabilities without virtualization overhead, Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) is hosted natively on top of TrueNAS inside a lightweight Debian 12 container. The guide explains dataset mapping, bridge networking, and installation steps to create a highly efficient, low-resource backup and storage solution.

In the homelab world, it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-provisioning hardware for a single task. Until recently, I had a dedicated bare-metal machine running Proxmox Backup Server (PBS). It had 2TB of usable storage, but my actual Proxmox VE backups only totaled around 350GB.

Leaving all that unused space locked strictly to backups felt like a massive waste. At the same time, I didn’t have a dedicated NAS appliance on my network. I really needed a centralized place for shared storage—dropping family photos, storing videos, and keeping all my Batocera save files synced up.

The solution? Nuke the bare-metal PBS installation, turn the hardware into a TrueNAS Scale appliance, and run Proxmox Backup Server on top of TrueNAS inside a lightweight Linux container. Here is a detailed look at how I pulled it off.

Converting an Old NTFS Drive to ext4 on Arch Linux (The “Nuke and Pave” Method)

Trevor February 16, 2026 No Comments

A practical, step-by-step guide on wiping a Windows NTFS hard drive and preparing it for native Arch Linux use. The post walks you through using cfdisk to recreate the partition table, forcing a format with mkfs.ext4 to overwrite stubborn NTFS signatures, configuring auto-mounting via /etc/fstab, and resolving the common ext4 root-ownership permission block so that the drive is fully usable by your user account