SOPS + age: Secrets in Git
Stop the .env-in-1Password dance. SOPS encrypts secrets per-key, age provides modern crypto, and git stores them safely. Here's how to ship it without footguns.
Tag: self-hosting
All the articles with the tag "self-hosting".
Self-Host a Local AI Coding Workhorse
Self-host Gemma 4 or Qwen3-Coder via Ollama or llama.cpp in Docker, then let Claude delegate the grunt work to it. Free tokens, zero code leakage.
WebAuthn & Passkeys for Sysadmins
Passkeys finally killed passwords for real users. Here's what WebAuthn actually is under the hood, and how to roll passkeys out on your self-hosted services.
Give Your AI Agent a Cheap Intern
Stop burning expensive AI tokens on boring grunt work. The overseer/workhorse pattern routes mechanical tasks to a cheap model and saves more than you'd think.
Borg vs Duplicacy: Dedup Backup Wars
Borg is open-source classic with SSH targets. Duplicacy has lock-free multi-source magic but commercial GUI. Here's which backup tool to pick.
Owntracks + Home Assistant: Private Location Tracking
Stop feeding Google your daily commute. OwnTracks + MQTT broker + Home Assistant gives you real presence detection without the surveillance capitalism overhead.
KVM/QEMU/libvirt: CLI Workflows
virt-manager is fine, but real homelab automation lives on the command line. virt-install, virsh, cloud-init, provision VMs in seconds, not click-by-click.
BirdNET-Pi for Self-Hosted Bird Identification
Turn a Raspberry Pi and a cheap USB mic into a self-hosted bird ID station using BirdNET-Pi and Cornell ML audio models running entirely locally offline.
Claude Code + SearXNG: Private Web Search
Wire a self-hosted SearXNG instance into Claude Code via a Bash wrapper for private, scriptable web search, and when to use it vs the built-in tool.
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.
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.
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.