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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Firefly III vs Actual vs Fava (Beancount)
Firefly III is full-featured. Actual Budget is YNAB-style. Fava+Beancount is plain-text accounting. Here's how to pick self-hosted personal finance.
10 min read -
Postgres HA: Patroni + etcd + HAProxy
Build a real Postgres 17 HA cluster with Patroni 4.x, etcd 3.5, and HAProxy — fully automatic failover, tested switchover procedure, zero manual babysitting.
12 min read -
Syncthing for Dotfiles: Sync vs Manage
Syncthing mirrors your files in real time, but is that actually a good idea for dotfiles? An honest comparison against chezmoi and proper dotfile managers.
11 min read -
Btrfs RAID 5/6: Still Don't
The kernel docs still warn about it. The Btrfs wiki still warns about it. People still build it and lose data. Here's the write hole, why RAID 1/10 are fine, and what to use instead.
6 min read -
Dragonfly vs Redis: Single-Binary Performance
DragonflyDB vs Redis 7.4 and Valkey 8.x: architecture deep dive, real performance benchmarks, honest gotchas, and when to swap your cache layer for a dragon.
10 min read -
ntfy vs Gotify vs Apprise: Push Stacks
ntfy is curl-friendly push with iOS. Gotify is self-hosted with web UI. Apprise abstracts 70+ providers. Here's how to wire homelab notifications.
10 min read -
Syncthing Through Untrusted VPS Relays
Sync files between machines that are never online together using Syncthing's untrusted encrypted devices, dual-VPS failover, and a Tailscale-only network path.
13 min read -
SnapRAID: Parity Without Real-Time RAID
Your media library doesn't write often enough to justify mdadm or ZFS overhead. SnapRAID calculates parity on a schedule, mixes drive sizes, and pairs with MergerFS for a unified pool. Here's the setup.
9 min read -
KeyDB: A Redis Fork With Multi-Threading
KeyDB forked Redis and shipped multi-threaded I/O and active-active replication years before Redis itself did. Here is whether it is still worth using today.
10 min read -
Mastodon vs Misskey vs Pleroma 2026
Three ActivityPub servers for your own fediverse instance. Mastodon polished, Misskey feature-rich, Pleroma/Akkoma lightweight. Here's how to pick.
12 min read -
mdadm Day-2: Grow, Replace, Scrub
Creating a RAID array is the easy part. The drama starts six months later when one drive starts dying. Here's the survival guide for everything that happens after mdadm --create.
11 min read -
Self-Hosted Email Gateways in 2026
Self-hosted secure email gateways compared: Proxmox Mail Gateway vs Hermes SEG vs DIY Rspamd, plus which classic appliances are now abandonware.
12 min read
