Kill-A-Watt Tour of Every Box in the Rack
Measure real homelab power draw box by box: wall meter vs smart plug, UPS, IPMI and RAPL, which numbers lie, and how to log watts to CSV and average them.
Tag: homelab
All the articles with the tag "homelab".
Temporal vs Cron: Durable Home Lab Jobs
Temporal vs cron plus bash for multi-step home lab jobs: what durable workflows buy you, the setup cost, and when a systemd timer is the smarter choice.
VLAN Trunking Gotchas Nobody Warns You
VLAN configured but traffic still breaks? Native VLAN mismatches, PVID traps on cheap switches, Proxmox bridge gotchas, and Docker macvlan fixes, with commands.
LinuxGSM: Boring Game Servers Done Right
LinuxGSM manages 140 game servers from one script. Compare bare-metal tmux plus cron against the official Docker image, using a Valheim server as the example.
SurrealDB vs Postgres: Real or Toy?
SurrealDB promises documents, graphs, search and realtime in one binary. I tested it against Postgres to see where that pitch holds up for self-hosters in 2026.
Batch Inference: One Model, 100 Users
Loading model weights, not math, is your GPU bottleneck. Continuous batching with llama-server serves many concurrent requests for close to the cost of one.
Cluster API for Homelab k3s
Cluster API turns k3s cluster lifecycle into YAML: create, scale, and upgrade whole clusters as code with a management cluster, no more one off scripts.
CrowdSec Across a Home Lab: One Brain
One central CrowdSec LAPI, remote log-parsing agents, and bouncers on every box, so an SSH brute-force on one server gets blocked everywhere else too.
IPv6 Dual-Stack: The Hard Parts
Dual-stack IPv6 for home labs: DHCPv6-PD delegation, stable addressing past SLAAC privacy extensions, real nftables firewall rules, and Docker IPv6 done right.
RomM and EmulatorJS: Retro on a NAS
RomM vs EmulatorJS explained: RomM is a ROM library manager that embeds EmulatorJS for browser play. Docker setup, metadata scraping, and save states compared.
Pterodactyl vs Pelican vs Crafty
Pterodactyl, Pelican, and Crafty Controller compared on container isolation, install steps, and RAM footprint, with verified versions and a real pick.
Nominatim Hardware Sizing
Real RAM, disk, and CPU numbers for self-hosted Nominatim. Planet vs region, mini PC vs server, what survives the import and what doesn't.