Technology, marketing, networking and the odd gadget review.
Plus all the other random stuff that crosses my mind: Hypervisors, VLANs, storage and backups, GPUs, Monitors, Keyboards. Twenty years of digital marketing leaks in from time to time, and so does football (LFC related). Read on at your own peril.
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Latest Posts
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Homelab hardening: what, where and how to start
You don’t need a security background to make your homelab a much harder target. You need an order of operations.
I spent an afternoon getting Claude to scan my homelab properly for the first time. I expected the scary findings to be at the edge: an open port, a forgotten forward. The edge was fine. The problems were all inside, in the boring places I’d never look at since things worked.
Read more about Homelab hardening: what, where and how to start
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Letting People In Without Opening a Port
Everything on my home network that has a web interface sits behind a reverse proxy, on a domain that never appears in public DNS. That works well until I leave the house.
The usual fix is a VPN, and I run one. But my work laptop can’t install Tailscale, and some of what I want from outside is just a browser tab: my notes in Trilium, my library in Calibre-web, trip plans in Trek, my AI agent Hermes, and copyparty for file transfers.
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Printing to a Windows Print Server from Linux
My Linux desktop couldn’t find two printers that every Windows machine in the house uses without trouble. The fix took one service, two drivers and an address format nobody explains.
There is an old Windows 11 laptop in my study called cirdan. It does one job: two printers are plugged into it by USB, a Brother DCP-L2535DW laser and an Epson L8050 inkjet, and it shares them with the rest of the house.
Read more about Printing to a Windows Print Server from Linux
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The kill switch held. IPv6 didn’t.
My router reboots itself every Sunday at 05:00. I read the boot log line by line to see whether my torrent client ever reached the internet without the VPN.
My router is an ASUS RT-BE88U running Asuswrt-Merlin. It runs a WireGuard client to hide.me, and Merlin’s VPN Director decides which LAN hosts go through it. Thirteen devices do. One of them is a small Proxmox container running qBittorrent.
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Four freezes, no logs: retiring a Proxmox node without knowing why it died
A ThinkCentre in my homelab kept hard-freezing and left nothing behind. This is how I narrowed it down, and why I swapped it out before I had the answer.
My Proxmox cluster,
thefellowship, runs on three small machines. Thorin, a Lenovo ThinkCentre M90q Gen 3 with an i5-12500T, carried the media side of the house: Jellyfin, qBittorrent, the *arr stack, and Frigate, the camera NVR.Read more about Four freezes, no logs: retiring a Proxmox node without knowing why it died