Tag: homelab

Grafana Alloy: Replacing the Agent After Deprecation

Grafana Agent hit EOL in November 2025. Here is how to migrate all your monitoring nodes to Alloy without losing your mind, your metrics, or your dashboards.

OpenTelemetry Collector: One Pipeline to Rule Them All

Replace five scattered agents with one OpenTelemetry Collector pipeline — metrics, logs, and traces unified with real config you can drop into a home server.

Backblaze B2 + rclone: Tiered Backup at Real-World Costs

Stop burning money on AWS egress fees. Here is how to build a real tiered backup strategy using Backblaze B2 plus rclone for your home lab setup in 2026.

Ceph for a 3-Node Home Lab: When It Actually Pays Off

Ceph on 3 nodes: real hardware requirements, honest performance tradeoffs, and exactly when distributed storage beats a plain NFS share for your home lab.

Kdenlive Proxy Editing on Weak Hardware

Edit 4K (or chunky 1080p60) on a mini PC without the timeline turning into a slideshow. Kdenlive proxies plus VAAPI/NVENC for cheap homelab editing.

Cosmos vs CasaOS vs Umbrel: All-in-One Home Server OSes Compared

Cosmos, CasaOS, and Umbrel each try to make self-hosting one-click. Here's how they actually compare on UI, security, app catalogs, and the all-important escape hatch when you outgrow them.

Snapper for Btrfs Snapshots on Root Filesystems

Set up Snapper on Btrfs to auto-snapshot before every system update, roll back broken machines in minutes, and never lose a working root filesystem again.

Plex Pass Hits $749. Time for Jellyfin.

Plex tripled the lifetime price to $749. Here's a decision tree plus a working Jellyfin migration plan: Docker, transcoding, clients, watch history.

Kopia Repository Server: Multi-Host Backups Done Right

Stop letting every machine write directly to S3. Kopia repository server gives you shared dedup, per-host auth, and sane maintenance — all in one place.

ZFS Send/Receive Over WireGuard for Off-Site Replication

Pipe ZFS incremental snapshots through WireGuard to a friend's NAS or a remote VPS. Encrypted in transit and at rest — no rsync.net bill or vendor lock-in.

mergerfs + SnapRAID: The Poor Man's Unraid

Skip the paid Unraid license. mergerfs + SnapRAID give you flexible JBOD pooling with parity protection on mismatched drives you already own, for free.

Object Storage on a Pi: SeaweedFS Cluster Walkthrough

Run a real S3-compatible object storage cluster on Raspberry Pi 4s with SeaweedFS — low RAM overhead, fast filer, no Ceph drama or surprise cloud bills.