SumGuy's Ramblings
The art of wasting time.
Docker, self-hosting, AI/LLM, Linux, and DevOps — explained by someone who learned the hard way. No fluff, no enterprise jargon, just practical stuff that actually works on real hardware.
Recent Posts
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SLO/SLI for Home Lab Services
SRE error budgets for home lab. Build Grafana SLO dashboards, understand SLI/SLO, pick sane availability targets.
10 min read -
Alertmanager Routing Trees That Don't Lie
Master Alertmanager routing trees: severity labeling, inhibition, grouping, and multi-receiver logic for reliable home lab alerts that work at 3 AM
9 min read -
Tempo + Grafana: Tracing for Self-Hosters
Distributed tracing with Tempo and Grafana for self-hosted multi-service stacks. OpenTelemetry, sampling, exemplars, and when tracing actually matters at home scale.
8 min read -
Bots Ate 90% of My Worker Quota
A WordPress login bot burned 90% of my Cloudflare Workers free tier in two hours attacking a site that has never run PHP. Here's what actually stopped it.
13 min read -
Mimir + Grafana: Long-Term Prometheus Storage
Mimir for long-term Prometheus storage. S3-backed, horizontally scaled alternative to Thanos for capacity planning and compliance.
8 min read -
Loki vs Vector for Log Shipping
Promtail vs Vector: which log shipping agent fits your setup? Loki's purpose-built simplicity or Vector's transform power and multiple sinks.
10 min read -
Prometheus Federation for Multi-Site Home Labs
Prometheus federation for multi-site home labs: hierarchical scraping, cross-cluster aggregation, federation vs remote_write, practical config.
10 min read -
rclone Crypt: Encrypted Cloud Buckets That Stay Yours
Client-side encryption with rclone crypt keeps your cloud backups opaque to providers. Key management, filename encryption, and restore drills for B2, S3, Drive.
10 min read -
TrueNAS Apps vs Docker on TrueNAS Scale
TrueNAS Scale ditched Kubernetes for native Docker. Apps catalog vs raw Compose, when each wins, dataset snapshots, and why custom apps took so long.
10 min read -
NFS vs SMB vs SSHFS vs WebDAV for Home Lab
Four file-sharing protocols for home lab networks: NFS (fast, Linux-native), SMB (Windows-friendly, ACLs), SSHFS (encrypted, portable), WebDAV (HTTP-based). When to use each.
11 min read -
Filesystem Decision Matrix: ext4 vs XFS vs ZFS vs Btrfs
Linux filesystem comparison: ext4 for safety, XFS for scale, ZFS for snapshots, Btrfs for flexibility. Pick the right tool for your workload.
8 min read -
Cold Archive: B2 vs Storj vs Scaleway Glacier
Compare cold storage tiers: Backblaze B2, Storj decentralized cloud, and Scaleway Glacier. Pricing, egress, restore times, and which backup service wins.
11 min read
