Posts
Deploying the manager before the fleet: Proxmox Datacenter Manager, ahead of the hardware
Proxmox Datacenter Manager is most useful once you have several clusters — so I deployed it before the cluster that justifies it. Here's the build, the gotchas, and why a read-only token went to an AI agent.
Jun 10, 2026 $ editor's pickA 1990s BBS game as a modern AI testbed
TradeWars 2002 is a text-based space-trading game from the BBS era — and a surprisingly good sandbox for AI agents.
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Karpathy's three layers — and how they show up in this lab
Andrej Karpathy's spec-verifier-environment framework isn't just advice for software engineers. It maps surprisingly well onto how a homelab AI setup actually works.
A cluster inside your cluster: how I test scary upgrades
Running small throwaway test clusters inside the main one, so the bleeding-edge software gets to break something disposable first.
Upgrading a Proxmox cluster with nobody noticing
How to take a Proxmox cluster from one major version to the next, one node at a time, without any of the services going down.
Why self-host anything in 2026?
Cloud apps are cheap and convenient. So why run your own? The honest case for owning your stack.
Donating idle compute with BOINC
Your homelab is mostly idle. BOINC turns those wasted cycles into real science.
Tailscale: reaching your lab from anywhere, safely
Tailscale builds a private mesh network over WireGuard so you can reach home services remotely without opening a single port.
Measuring your network: iperf3, LibreSpeed, and Speedtest Tracker
Three tools that answer three different questions about your network — and why running them yourself tells you more than Ookla ever will.
Running AI locally — privacy, control, and cost
Why I'm building toward local model inference instead of leaning entirely on cloud AI.
LiteLLM: one gateway for every AI model
Running multiple AI models from different providers? LiteLLM gives them all a single OpenAI-compatible front door.
Home Assistant: a smart home that stays in your house
Why the leading open-source smart home platform beats cloud ecosystems for privacy, flexibility, and long-term control.
Apache Guacamole: remote desktops in a browser tab
How a clientless remote desktop gateway lets you SSH, RDP, and VNC into anything from any browser — no client software required.
Gotify: push notifications you own
Gotify is a lightweight, self-hosted push notification server that lets your whole homelab talk back to you — no cloud middleman required.
Wazuh: bringing a SOC home
How an open-source SIEM gives a homelab the same threat-detection muscle that enterprise security teams rely on.
Uptime Kuma: a status page in five minutes
Uptime Kuma turns a single Docker container into a real-time monitor and status page for everything you self-host.
Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana: seeing everything at once
How a three-component open-source stack gives you deep visibility into a homelab — and why it's worth the setup cost.
Self-hosted draw.io: diagrams without an account
Run your own draw.io instance and get full-featured infrastructure diagramming with no account, no subscription, and no data leaving your network.
Gitea: your own GitHub, minus the cloud
Gitea is a lightweight, self-hosted Git service that gives you full code ownership, pull requests, webhooks, and CI/CD hooks — on hardware you control.
Hosting static sites at home with a webhook deploy
How a tiny nginx container and a webhook sidecar turn a git push into a live update in seconds.
Homepage: the dashboard that ties the lab together
A plain-language look at Homepage, the self-hosted dashboard that turns a wall of bookmarks into a single pane of glass.
Portainer: a friendly face for Docker
How a web UI turns a scattered fleet of Docker hosts into one manageable dashboard — and when it's worth the setup.
NetBox: a source of truth for your infrastructure
What IPAM and DCIM actually mean, why a homelab needs a source of truth, and how NetBox fills that role.
Authentik: one login for the entire homelab
How a self-hosted identity provider replaces a dozen separate passwords and brings enterprise-grade SSO to your rack.
HashiCorp Vault: where my secrets actually live
A plain-language guide to running HashiCorp Vault in a homelab — what it does, why it matters, and whether you actually need it.
ntopng: actually seeing what is on your network
A plain-language look at network traffic monitoring for homelabs, and why ntopng earned a permanent spot in the rack.
Cloudflare Tunnel: exposing a service without opening a port
How to publish a homelab service to the internet without touching your router or exposing your IP address.
Nginx Proxy Manager: one front door for every service
How a reverse proxy with a friendly web UI tames the chaos of dozens of self-hosted services — no config files required.
OPNsense: turning a PC into a serious firewall
OPNsense brings enterprise-grade routing, firewalling, and VLAN segmentation to commodity hardware — here's why it belongs in a homelab.
Proxmox Backup Server: deduplicated backups that just work
How PBS turns a Proxmox cluster into a self-healing backup machine — and why it's worth the extra VM.
Proxmox VE: the free hypervisor that runs my whole lab
How an open-source hypervisor replaced VMware, unified dozens of VMs under one roof, and turned a rack into a real learning platform.