Quiet, low-power, recoverable home infrastructure for real rooms: NAS boxes, backup targets, small edge hosts, and services that do not need a rack-shaped excuse.
Latest Suite Despair updates
Your Immich Backup Is Not Done Until It Restores
A clean Immich restore drill using Docker Compose, a database backup, and the full upload location.
Build Notes 1: A Rock 5T Kubernetes Cluster That Did Its Homework
Dual-O's three-node Rock 5T Talos cluster uses dual 2.5GbE, NVMe, PoE, and a 27 W idle wall-power result to make a small ARM Kubernetes lab feel deliberate.
ODROID-H5 First Look: 10GbE, M.2 Slots, and the Small-Cluster Pivot
Hardkernel's new H5 looks less like a direct H4 Ultra SATA NAS successor and more like a tiny 10GbE/M.2 node for clusters and accelerator experiments.
A Small NixOS Public Edge Host, Begrudgingly in the Cloud
A small, rebuildable Oracle Cloud edge box for SSH and later remote access, without turning the article into a map of the private estate.
Using Pangolin to Reach a CGNAT Homelab Without Moving House
A worked follow-on to the NixOS OCI edge host: Pangolin on the public side, one Newt site at home, one public app, and one private admin path.
Managing Homelab Secrets Without Committing Them Like a Menace
A public-safe pattern for keeping real service credentials out of the repo while still fitting a rebuildable NixOS host.
Minimal Homelab Monitoring Without Building a Monitoring Empire
A small Monit setup that catches the failures that matter without turning monitoring into a second project.
Adding a Homelab Service with NixOS, Podman, and Fewer Rituals
A rebuild-first pattern for adding one real service to a NixOS host with explicit state, env placeholders, validation, and backup scope.
M720q: Idle Manners
Measured wall-power results for a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q running headless Debian: default idle, tuned idle, BIOS cleanup, and why the settled band matters more than one minimum reading.
The Boring Offsite Backup Box, Correctly Boring
A Raspberry Pi, an SSD, and ZFS receive, kept away from second-homelab nonsense.
Building a Minimal NixOS Homelab Host Before the Nonsense Starts
A small NixOS baseline with flakes, key-only SSH, firewall defaults, fail2ban, and rebuild checks.
Why My NAS Ended Up Built Around an ODROID H4 Ultra
Why the H4 Ultra made a cleaner low-power, 10-inch rack NAS than the previous CWWK and Jonsbo build.
3-2-1 Backup Without Shipping Your Whole NAS to the Cloud
How I narrowed offsite backup scope across ZFS snapshots, a Pi replica, and Backblaze B2.