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.
New here? Start with the about page, or work backwards through the tags.
Latest Posts
-
Five Copies, Two and a Half Fault Domains
3-2-1 is the rule everyone quotes. Three copies of your data, on two different media, with one offsite. It is a good floor and it is easy to think you have cleared it when you have not.
I counted my copies earlier this year and got five. Primary NAS (NAS1), secondary NAS (NAS2), a cold box, a drive at the office, and OneDrive. Comfortably past the bar. Then I counted what could fail independently and got roughly two and a half.
-
Where Guest Network Pro Runs Out
The topology post ended on a promise. I said Guest Network Pro on the RT-BE88U would let me finally segment the IoT and media gear off the main network, and that having hardware which supported it natively removed my last excuse for not doing it.
It removed about seventy percent of the excuse. This is where the other thirty percent lives.
-
The Layer the Cable Map Doesn’t Show
I’ve already drawn the cables. This is where the packets actually go.
Back in May I published the full topology of the house: every switch, every 10G run, every zone. That was the easy half. Cables tell you what’s physically possible. They tell you nothing about where a DNS query goes, which door a request came through, or why one machine’s traffic leaves the country and another’s doesn’t. If you go back far enough in this blog, you would have noticed that I’ve been using the Asus RT routers since the original N56U (in 2011!). While they can do most of the basic functions (and some of the advanced ones with the Merlin firmware), I’ve taken advantage of my homelab to add on a few more bells n whistles.
-
I Built a Dashboard for the Things I Actually Check
Five separate logins became one page. The interesting part was how often I turned out to be wrong.
I check five things regularly: whether the homelab is healthy, my portfolio, my health trend, whatever trip is coming up, and my to-do list. Each one lived somewhere different. Each had its own login. None of them talked to each other. I have to go looking for information by opening a browser, going to my bookmarks page and finding the right tile to click:
-
Two Brains for My AI: How Obsidian and Trilium Split the Work
I've spent the last few months tinkering with a local AI stack on my desktop — Ollama for local inference, Hermes orchestrating the whole thing, and a Claude subscription for the heavy lifting. It works. But there was always one nagging gap I kept dancing around: where does the AI's memory actually live? For a…