A while back I came across someone’s write-up of a 1U firewall appliance they’d picked up from AliExpress for $290. Intel N100, four 2.5G Intel i226-V ports, a PCIe slot for SFP+ modules. Runs pfSense. One year on, they reported zero freezes, zero reboots, quiet as you like, cool enough in a home office with no air conditioning.

That last detail stuck with me. No AC and it just keeps going. That’s the kind of reliability review I actually trust, because nobody’s trying to sell you anything.

Someone posted their homelab setup online recently and the project itself is genuinely clever: they took their network diagram out of a drawing tool and made it a build artefact instead. A text file in a repo, a GitHub Actions workflow that renders it on every push, icons pulled from public sources at render time so nothing drifts. The diagram can’t lie to you because it rebuilds itself from the thing that is actually true.

There’s a particular kind of frustration reserved for software that was genuinely useful, and then gradually wasn’t.

Netdata used to be exactly what I wanted. Install it, point a browser at port 19999, and immediately get a dense wall of real-time graphs showing exactly what your machine was doing. CPU, memory, disk IO, network throughput. All of it, updating every second, no configuration required. For a home server running a few containers and some self-hosted services, it was perfect.

So there’s a fresh Linux kernel vulnerability doing the rounds this week — dubbed CopyFail — and if you’re running any Linux-based systems at home or at work, it’s worth taking a few minutes to understand what’s actually going on before you either panic-patch everything or, worse, shrug and do nothing.

I’ve been following the discussion online and it’s been… instructive, in the way that watching people argue about fire safety while standing in a building that may or may not be on fire tends to be.

There’s something deeply satisfying about watching a piece of “dead” hardware get a second life. I’ve been following a thread online this week about someone who turned their broken Steam Deck — the LCD screen had given up the ghost — into a fully functional NAS running Debian 12, and honestly, it’s the kind of project that makes me grin like an idiot.

The setup is genuinely clever. Debian 12 minimal install (no GUI, because why would you need one?), a 2.5GbE USB NIC, 6TB of main storage plus a 4TB backup drive, and rsync doing incremental backups at around 280MB/s. That’s not shabby at all for repurposed gaming hardware sitting on someone’s desk. They’ve even wired up a Stream Deck for one-button safe shutdown, HDD temperature checks, and quick SSH access. The chef’s kiss detail though? A small secondary 8.8" HDMI display running Glances locally for real-time system monitoring — CPU, RAM, network, processes, all at a glance without needing to SSH in.

There’s something deeply unsettling about reading someone’s story about building digital recovery systems after multiple concussions. I came across this fascinating discussion recently where a developer shared their solution to a problem most of us probably haven’t thought about enough: what happens to our digital lives when we’re suddenly unable to access them?

The premise is simple but sobering. After several bike accidents resulting in concussions, this person started wondering: what if next time, I can’t remember how to log into my own systems? It’s the kind of thought that hits different when you’re sitting there with your coffee, scrolling through your perfectly organised 1Password vault with hundreds of credentials.

There’s something oddly humbling about discovering your “secure” setup isn’t quite as bulletproof as you thought. I came across a discussion recently where someone found their Minecraft server had been visited by an unknown player, despite being confident it was locked down behind Tailscale with proper firewall rules. The kicker? They’d left port 443 open at some point “by mistake.”

Look, I get it. We’ve all been there. You set something up, you think you’ve got all your ducks in a row, and then reality comes knocking with a gentle reminder that security is less about a single tool and more about layers of careful configuration. What struck me about this discussion wasn’t just the breach itself, but the fascinating ecosystem of Minecraft server crawlers and griefers that apparently exists out there in the digital wilderness.

I recently stumbled across a blog post from someone who’s been self-hosting for thirteen years, documenting their journey to what they consider their ideal setup: OpenSUSE MicroOS with Podman. It’s a fascinating read, but what really caught my attention wasn’t the technical stack itself – it was the discussion it sparked about complexity and what that even means in our world of DIY infrastructure.

One commenter absolutely nailed it: “There’s some major self-delusion involved in any self-hoster when they say their DIY stack is ’low complexity’. Let’s be honest, nobody else knows wth we did in there. We all build arcane rat’s nests and then go ‘isn’t that beautiful?’”

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes with finding your carefully curated music collection locked behind ransomware encryption. It’s not the sort of thing you expect to happen to a Raspberry Pi running a music server in your home network. Yet here we are, and someone in the self-hosting community just lived through exactly that scenario with want_to_cry, a relatively unknown ransomware variant that targets vulnerable SAMBA configurations.

What struck me reading through the thread wasn’t just the incident itself, but the follow-up discussion—and more importantly, how the person who got hit took ownership of their mistakes and shared them publicly. That takes guts, especially when admitting you didn’t fully understand what DMZ mode actually does on your home router.

Someone on Reddit recently announced Wizarr 2025.10.0, and buried in their feature list was this absolutely perfect line: “Overengineering solutions is in the essence of selfhosting and homelabbing!” The comments that followed were gold - people practically queuing up to admit they felt personally attacked by this statement. One user mentioned implementing single sign-on through Authentik for just two users. Another wrote their own log processor because they were fed up with their existing setup not working perfectly.

I’ve been mulling over a question that popped up in one of the tech communities I follow recently, and it’s one of those deceptively simple queries that actually opens up a fascinating discussion about security practices. Someone asked why using a reverse proxy is considered safer than directly exposing service ports, and honestly, their follow-up question was spot on: “Doesn’t it just bump the problem up a level?”

The question really resonated with me because it touches on something I see all the time in my DevOps work – people implementing security practices without fully understanding the underlying principles. It’s like following a recipe without knowing why each ingredient matters. Sure, you might end up with something edible, but you won’t know how to adapt when things go sideways.

The tech world often pushes us toward the latest and greatest hardware, but there’s something deeply satisfying about seeing old devices given new purpose. Today, I stumbled upon a fascinating post about a repurposed laptop serving as a home server, and it sparked some thoughts about our relationship with technology and sustainability.

Picture this: a battle-scarred laptop, survivor of a neighbor’s domestic dispute, transformed into a fully functional home server. The specs would make most tech enthusiasts cringe - a humble Celeron processor, 4GB of RAM, and a mix of storage drives. Yet, this modest setup runs multiple services including Nextcloud and Immich, effectively replacing expensive cloud subscriptions.