Latest posts
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No Plaintext Anywhere: A Secrets Pass Over the Whole Lab
Before mirroring my repos to GitHub, I audited every place a credential could hide. Found a few. This is what the pass looked like.
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Checking on the Lab from Anywhere
WireGuard gets me into the lab from anywhere through one UDP port. The real lesson is what the tunnel shouldn’t excuse behind it.
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Why I Self-Host GitLab and Still Mirror to GitHub
Running my own GitLab means backups, upgrades, and runners are my problem. That’s the point. GitHub stays as the mirror.
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Homelab Monitoring Without the Guesswork
Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana in Docker. Numeric OIDs over MIBs, dashboards provisioned from git, and a diagnosis story about sparse graphs.
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Network Configs That Back Themselves Up
Ansible pulls the configs, vault encrypts them, git keeps the history, Semaphore runs it on schedule. NetBox tells everyone what exists.
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Automating a Legacy Cisco Switch with Ansible
My 2960G predates most of the tools trying to manage it. Legacy SSH crypto, paramiko pins, and the other gotchas of automating old IOS.
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Home Lab AI Update
I’ve been running a home lab since 2002, but the last few weeks it’s turned into something closer to a full enterprise analog: NetBox as the source of truth, Ansible with vault-encrypted credentials, Semaphore running playbooks from Git, automated encrypted config backups, and a Telegraf/InfluxDB/Grafana monitoring stack. Self-hosted GitLab with a GitHub mirror for version…
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OPNsense Home Setup
My OPNsense Setup My network runs modem → OPNsense → Cisco 2960G. The OPNsense box is just a Dell thin client I repurposed, and I 3D-printed a bracket so it mounts cleanly under my desk, completely out of the way. I’ve got VLANs set up in OPNsense to keep the security cameras isolated from the…