Tag: homelab

Idle Watts Audit: Halve Your Lab's Draw

Find what pins your home lab at high idle power: ASPM, package C-states, disks, NICs, and chatty containers. Measure at the wall and fix one blocker at a time.

One PC, Many Players: Steam Headless

Run several Steam Headless v2 containers on one Linux box so a household can play at once, each seat streamed with Moonlight. Compose file, numbers, gotchas.

Uptime Kuma vs Gatus vs Cachet

Uptime Kuma, Gatus, and Cachet all make a status page, but only two of them check anything. Here is which one to run in a home lab, with Compose files for each.

Sizing 7 Days to Die and Other RAM Hogs

Size RAM for a 7 Days to Die server and other hogs (Palworld, Valheim, modded Minecraft). Measure real use, cap it in Docker, and restart on a schedule.

Home Lab Threat Model: What's Exposed

Mass scanners find a new home lab IP within hours. Audit what the internet can reach, from UPnP to Docker ports to IPv6, then build a threat model that fits.

Kyverno: K8s Policy Without Rego

Kyverno on k3s: validate, mutate, generate, verify signed images, handle exceptions, and test policies in CI. Plus the CEL policy types replacing ClusterPolicy.

Btrfs Send/Receive: Incremental Backups

Back up btrfs with send and receive: full and incremental streams over SSH, parent snapshots, restores, failure modes, and btrbk to automate the whole loop.

Grafana Dashboard Sprawl: 50 Panels to 10

Your Grafana dashboard is a wall of 50 panels nobody reads. Use USE and RED to cut it to ten, move the rest to drill-downs, and keep the result in git.

Solar Plus Battery for Your Home Lab

Grid-tied solar shuts off in an outage. The battery keeps your lab alive. Size it first, then the panels, with real prices for a power station vs a 48V build.

OpenCost on k3s: What Your Pods Cost

A home lab has no cloud invoice. Feed OpenCost your power rate and hardware price, then see which namespace on your k3s cluster is the real monthly cost hog.

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.

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.