Tag: homelab
Weeknotes no.3 – how AI-pilled are you? 🧠💊
Taken the ai fluency index test?
Weeknotes no.2 – hello AT Proto & local LLM 🦋🦖
Added AT Proto publishing to my blog and played with local LLM models
e559 – Welcome to the Matrix
Michael R and Andy have a different format of discussion this time around, and it counts as a "geek out"! A catch up on Andy's current work project, homelabbing, games of interest, and more.
Weeknotes no.1 – atproto, homelab, and AI
A week of exploring the atproto protocol, homelab, and AI.
Choosing Friction and Clear Skies: I’m No Longer Using Cloudflare
I'm pausing my folk.zone project to completely replace Cloudflare in my stack with more ethical choices after a conversation with Adam Newbold of omg.lol, the site that inspired the project in the first place. For in practice, there is no such thing as neutrality, and convenience is not a virtue.
Announcing folk.zone: An attempt to build the IndieWeb commons myself.
Announcing folk.zone, a collection of free, community-run internet services I'm building as an IndieWeb commons. Including Mastodon, WriteFreely, Forgejo, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and more. All self-hosted on hardware in my living space. This is infrastructure for the common folk, not for enterprise or scale, inspired by omg.lol and rooted in the IndieWeb and Fediverse principles.
Homelab For the Beginner: You Can Self-host Your Own Server on $50 Hardware
A beginner-friendly guide to building your own homelab on inexpensive hardware. Covers finding old computers, setting up Linux, SSH, Docker, and self-hosting services like password managers, RSS readers, and your own Fediverse instance. Digital sovereignty doesn't require expensive equipment.
schtasks /change silently breaks interactive tasks
renamed a domain account, updated 30 scheduled tasks with the new password, and accidentally broke 20 of them. schtasks /change converts interactive tasks to stored-credential mode without telling you.
three layers of silence: when monitoring fails to monitor itself
discord feeds hadn't posted in 5 days. the health check that should have caught it passed silently. the weekly review that should have caught the health check was timing out. a cascading failure in three acts.
taming Windows display switching with the CCD API
MultiMonitorTool broke on Windows 11 24H2. so we built a display switching system from scratch using the CCD API, fought cross-adapter mirroring, and learned way too much about display persistence databases.
openclaw-ssh: why your agent shouldn't shell out for SSH
we built an openclaw extension for native SSH and published it. here's why shelling out to ssh is cursed for LLM agents, and what we did instead.
every windows SSH agent is broken, so we built one
Bitwarden's SSH agent freezes under load. Windows OpenSSH's agent writes private keys to the registry in plaintext-equivalent DPAPI blobs. no standalone memory-only agent exists for Windows. so we built ephemeral-agent in Go.
suricata ate all the RAM and the router forgot how to route
load average 30, 96MB free RAM, 1.3GB in swap. the UniFi gateway was swap-thrashing so hard it couldn't serve its own web console.
task scheduler was broken for three months and nobody noticed
a windows server's task scheduler silently died months ago. we didn't find out until march 2026. the root cause? RAM corruption from late 2024.
cheap clocks and kerberos: why your mini PC domain controller keeps losing time
one of our domain controllers kept dropping out as a time source every hour. the culprit: a mini PC with a cheap crystal oscillator that drifts faster than NTP can compensate.
home assistant logs were never arriving
two bugs in a syslog add-on meant home assistant was silently sending nothing to graylog. both bugs were invisible.
too many keys in the agent
14 SSH keys in the agent, MaxAuthTries of 6, and a custom agent filter to fix it.
notepad++ was compromised for six months
checking all our machines after the notepad++ supply chain attack disclosure.
homebrew python can't see the network
macOS sequoia silently blocks homebrew python from local network access in launchd agents. system python works fine.
soundbot needed node.js and nobody told it
a discord bot couldn't download youtube clips. the error said 'no javascript runtime.' it was running in docker without node.
ansible vs the choco rate limiter
getting ansible to manage windows workstations. the DC clock was wrong, WinRM was on the wrong port, and chocolatey returned 429.
labutility is dead, long live labutility
reinstalling a VM with server 2025, then spending 3 hours making the scheduled task actually start.
the domain controllers are 52 minutes behind
tried to join the mac to active directory. discovered the entire domain's time is wrong. kerberos does not approve.
moving day
migrating from a WSL instance on a windows desktop to my own mac mini. nyan gets a real home.
building a voice
giving home assistant a catgirl brain — from webhook to spoken word.
Discord Alternatives, Ranked
Building an online community takes more than tools. But the right tool can make all the difference.
Discord Alternatives, Ranked
Building an online community takes more than tools. But the right tool can make all the difference.
Discord Alternatives, Ranked
Building an online community takes more than tools. But the right tool can make all the difference.
Discord Alternatives, Ranked
Building an online community takes more than tools. But the right tool can make all the difference.
Install Cockpit on Debian 13 trixie
edafe.de/cockpit Cockpit provides an easy-to-use, web-based interface for administering Linux systems. It simplifies tasks such as monitoring logs, controlling system services, configuring networks, and managing virtual machines. Cockpit has been described as a "useful and extensible tool to observe, manage, and troubleshoot Linux servers". Step 1 cockpit requires the use of the firewalld service to...
New Video Series: Retro Corner
A few days back i started a new series on YouTube, named “Retro Corner”. The plan is to get some old hardware up and running (Starting with the IBM ThinkPad R51e in video 1) and then continue on with some other machines (I have a couple of old Mac Laptops coming in the next video)...
Stop Breaking Things: A Gentle Introduction to NixOS in the Homelab
I'm speaking at Southeast LinuxFest 2025!
Network Upgrades 2025
It's been just over a year since I last posted my 2024 Network Upgrade post. In that time, my network has undergone several changes. Here are the major updates: Swapped from a UDM Pro to a UCG Fiber. Upgraded my FTTH link from 2Gb to 5Gb! (Hence the upgrade from the UDM Pro) Added a...
Announcing The Homelab Almanac: Version 3.0
The best guide to homelabs just got a lot better—and bigger.
Announcing The Homelab Almanac: Version 3.0
The best guide to homelabs just got a lot better—and bigger.
Announcing The Homelab Almanac: Version 3.0
The best guide to homelabs just got a lot better—and bigger.
Announcing The Homelab Almanac: Version 3.0
The best guide to homelabs just got a lot better—and bigger.
Homelab 2.5 Ideas
Jotting down some ideas for improvements to make to my homelab / home network when I move to Puerto Rico.