Articles

How I rolled out Authentik as a central identity provider for my homelab - OIDC for Proxmox, Paperless-ngx, LibreNMS and Komodo, forward-auth for everything else, and the integration gotchas I hit along the way.

My firewall's disk filled itself with 188 GB of firewall logs in a single day - and the GUI died with it. What followed was a deep dive through ARP tables, switch FDBs, and LACP hashing, ending at a subtle interaction between CARP virtual MACs and MLAG that turned my HA firewall pair into two firewalls routing the same packets in parallel.

How I moved ~70 repositories off GitHub and built a fully self-hosted software supply chain: Forgejo for git, Woodpecker for CI, Harbor as the registry, and Komodo for deployments - including the auto-deploy loop and the pitfalls that cost me the most time.

Six months after going all-in on UniFi, I ripped out the UDM Pro Max again. This is the story of building a truly highly available home network: an OPNsense CARP pair on repurposed Sophos appliances, a MikroTik MLAG core, and all the lessons that came with leaving the walled garden.

Building a transparent Steam download cache with lancache monolithic, DNS overrides in Unbound on an OPNsense HA pair, NFS storage from TrueNAS, and automatic prefill of every game I own - including new purchases.

Why I stopped renting my music library and built my own streaming stack instead - Plex and Plexamp as the player, a Soulseek-first acquisition pipeline with slskd, Lidarr-style automation, and everything running in Docker on my homelab.

Why I replaced wiki pages with NetBox as the single source of truth for my homelab - the Cloud vs self-hosting decision, my modeling conventions for devices, VLANs and IP space, and how structured documentation pays off when everything changes at once.

Why I built a real Active Directory at home with Samba as the domain controller - central authentication for the whole family, a DFS namespace spanning two NAS boxes, and the lessons learned about DNS, VLANs, and msdfs along the way.

How I run Paperless-ngx in my homelab as a document management system for both private and business paperwork - covering my tagging convention, consume-folder automation, the pitfalls I ran into, and why a backup only counts once you've actually restored it.

A complete overhaul of my home network infrastructure - migrating from TP-Link to UniFi, implementing Zero Trust architecture with dynamic VLANs, and building a properly segmented network with 10G fiber uplinks.

My journey through setting up Zigbee2MQTT - from initial struggles to a working smart home setup, with all the technical details you need.

How I drastically reduced my Docker image sizes by better understanding layers - a practical journey.

A step-by-step guide to installing OpenHAB on Linux, covering the entire process from initial setup to verification, based on real-world experience and practical tips.

This article details the steps I took to convert a Windows PFX certificate into a PEM format, making it usable on Linux systems. I encountered the challenge of only having a PFX certificate and needed to find a solution to use it in my Linux environment, specifically with NGINX.

In this process, we set up a high-availability Kubernetes cluster using k3s and Keepalived, and then installed and configured CertManager for certificate management and Traefik as an ingress controller, ensuring a robust, secure, and scalable infrastructure.

The article recounts the author's experience in upgrading their home network to a sophisticated homelab setup, involving the installation of advanced networking hardware and overcoming technical challenges during the migration process, ultimately resulting in a more capable and customized network infrastructure.

Solun is a service that allows you to share files, text and sending emails with end-to-end encryption, without having to worry about your privacy.

I describe the first steps in the new home network and how I connected the 2 main hubs.

In this article we will look at how to deploy Solun and save ourselves most of the work. But at the same time we also want to have a good visible version history that we manage via Discord.

We try to structure the Solun network as well as possible and at the same time be as cheap as possible. In this article, we will show you how we have structured our server and what we have chosen for it.

How safe is Solun and how can you participate. We also ask ourselves the question what is the future of Solun? We will answer all these questions in this article.

Solun is a service that allows you to share files, text and sending emails with end-to-end encryption, without having to worry about your privacy.