Articles & Engineering Notes
Technical documentation, architecture deep dives, and production troubleshooting from the lab.
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One Login to Rule Them All: Setting Up Authentik OIDC and Hardware Passkeys Across 15+ Services
How I eliminated password sprawl across 15+ homelab services using self-hosted Authentik, OpenID Connect (OIDC), and hardware YubiKey WebAuthn authentication.
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Hunting Network Ghosts: Centralizing Syslog from UniFi, Linux, and Windows with Grafana Loki & Promtail
How I eliminated fragmented device consoles by deploying Grafana Loki and Promtail to ingest RFC-5424 syslog streams across my UniFi gateway, switches, Docker nodes, and Windows hosts—secured behind…
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Ditching Google Photos: Tuning Immich on Docker with Vector Search & Facial Recognition
How I migrated tens of thousands of family and project photos away from cloud subscriptions to self-hosted Immich on Docker, tuned PostgreSQL pgvector and Valkey, and conquered CPU…
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Automating Monitoring at Scale: How I Configured All Five Action Engines in Zabbix 7.0
A monitoring dashboard that merely turns red when something breaks is only half a solution. Here is how I architected, automated, and hardened all five action engines in…
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Controlling My Homelab over Signal: Building an Encrypted AI Bot Daemon
How I built a zero-cloud, end-to-end encrypted management daemon using Signal-CLI REST API and Python to monitor, query, and command my homelab infrastructure securely from my phone without…
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My 10-VLAN UniFi Blueprint: How I Segmented Home, Office, and Storage
The single most common mistake I see in both small business setups and enthusiast homelabs is the “flat network.” Everything—family tablets, smart lightbulbs, IP cameras, production domain controllers,…
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Enterprise SIEM in the Lab: Deploying Wazuh 4.14 Across Active Directory, Linux, and Hypervisors
Firewalls and VLANs protect your perimeter, but they tell you almost nothing about what happens inside an operating system once a machine is on your network. If an…
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Calling My AI: How I Hooked Up a Local LLM to FreePBX and Hardware Desk Phones
Interacting with artificial intelligence through a web browser or a smartphone chat app gets old fast. Typing out prompts while you are knee-deep in a server rack with…
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Building \ Lab OS\: How I Created a Real-Time Interactive Network Topology Map with D3.js
Static network diagrams are obsolete the minute you finish drawing them. You spend hours in Visio or draw.io making clean boxes and lines, and a week later you…
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Zero Plaintext Secrets: How I Use an Internal Vaultwarden as a Central Network Keystore
If you look through the repositories, scripts, and Docker Compose files of most IT environments, you will find a horror show: plain text passwords in .env files, hardcoded…