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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Linux Namespaces from Scratch
Containers are just namespaces and cgroups in a trench coat. Build one yourself with unshare and nsenter — no Docker required. Demystifies what actually happens.
15 min read -
rclone vs Restic: Sync vs Backup
rclone copies and syncs files to cloud storage. Restic does deduplicated encrypted snapshots. Confusing them costs you restores at 2 AM.
11 min read -
Scrypted vs Frigate for Self-Hosted Cameras
Scrypted bridges your IP cameras to HomeKit and Google Home. Frigate adds AI object detection on your own hardware. Here's how to pick — or run both at once.
10 min read -
mtr vs traceroute: Packet Loss
traceroute lies. mtr tells the truth. Here's how to read packet-loss reports like an oncall engineer and stop blaming your ISP for the wrong hop.
11 min read -
ESPresense: Room-Level Bluetooth Presence in Home Assistant
Track which room you're in using cheap ESP32 nodes and BLE signal distance — real room-level presence for Home Assistant automations that don't annoy you daily.
11 min read -
ZFS Encryption vs LUKS
Native ZFS dataset encryption vs LUKS under your pool — which layer to encrypt at, performance trade-offs, key management, and raw send/recv.
12 min read -
iperf3 + nload: Network Diagnosis
Your gigabit link drops to 200 Mbps and you don't know why. iperf3 measures throughput honestly, nload visualizes traffic — together they find the bottleneck fast.
13 min read -
Plex Meta Manager: Posters, Collections, Sanity
Stop staring at a Plex library that looks like a clearance bin. Kometa (formerly Plex Meta Manager) automates collections, posters, overlays, and bulk ratings.
9 min read -
Syncthing vs Resilio vs Seafile
Dropbox got expensive and your data left the building. Syncthing, Resilio Sync, and Seafile compared — pick the one that fits your threat model.
10 min read -
SMART Disk Monitoring with smartmontools
Disks fail. SMART tells you when. Here's how smartctl and smartd actually predict failure, and the attributes that matter (most don't).
10 min read -
Jellyseerr Tagging Workflows for Real Libraries
Stop guessing whose request is clogging your 4K library. Jellyseerr tags + Sonarr/Radarr + Maintainerr = real per-user quota control that actually holds up.
10 min read -
fio: Real Disk Benchmarking
Stop trusting marketing IOPS numbers. fio measures what your disk actually does on your workload — sequential, random, mixed. Here's how to read the output honestly.
12 min read
