Fullmetalbrackets

As of June 15, 2026 the OCI always-free tier will halve the limits of Arm-based Ampere A1 instances down to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB memorys.

If you want to find out when a Linux filesystem was created, the tune2fs command will give you this information, along with many more details.

When having a dynamic IP address that can change without you noticing, it can be handy to have a sensor you can add to your Home Assistant that shows the current IP and can be automated to send you notifications when it changes.

In case you encounter this on your Nintendo Switch OLED, especially if it is a Japanese or Asian model, you need to use specific Wi-Fi channels on your router that the console can detect.

YouTube has been on a mission to force it's users to watch more frequent and longer ads, while also making the experience worse for users that try to use adblockers, to push them onto YouTube Premium.

I love the Flint 2 router from GL.iNet, but the built-in AdGuard Home cannot handle the amount of devices, blocklists and custom filter rules I need.

I'm testing out daily driving Bazzite on my old Windows PC, but coming from Debian and Ubuntu there's some quirks and weirdness I'm not used to, so I made this as a reference for myself and any others who encounter similar issues.

After putting it off for a long time, I finally decided I should dynamically generate OG images for my blog posts, since I don't use typically use a hero image or cover photos.

I used qBittorrent for literally years before realizing that qBittorrent had a built-in way to search for torrents.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI for short, has a very generous free tier, but I see a lot of people on the oraclecloud and selfhosted subreddits being confused about exactly what's included, so here is a straightforward breakdown of every service and…

Plex has built-in remote access that mostly just works, but you still have to configure your router to use it properly.

I have a Plex Pass subscription, but unfortunately Plex's built-in remote access won't work behind CGNAT, so I use Tailscale to securely access my Plex library and entire home network when I'm not home.

My old Dell Optiplex has been a great desktop PC for just minimal interneting and coding.

Beginning April 29th, 2025 the pricing for Plex Pass increased at the same time that remote access got paywalled behind it.

If your homelab has more than a few servers or VMs running Debian-based distributions, it makes sense to set up a package caching proxy on one of your servers.

ZimaBoard is an x86 single board server that comes running Debian 11 Bullseye and CasaOS.

I turned my old Dell PC into an all-in-one home server and network attached storage to self-host all my data, my photos, and my media library, running Home Assistant, Plex and other services, all securely accessible from outside my home with Tailscale.

I've used a reverse proxy to access my self-hosted apps and services for years, and used Pi-Hole as my home network DNS for even longer, but recently switched to AdGuard Home.

I've recently been playing around with ZimaBoard, a single board server running Debian and CasaOS.

I've used a reverse proxy to access my self-hosted apps and services for years, but I recently re-did everything from scratch and decided to write it down.

Tailscale is my new homelab toy.

I wrote before about sharing my Plex library via Cloudflare Tunnel, but that is technically against their TOS and liable to get your account in trouble.

Exposing Plex to share your library with other users normally involves port forwarding from the router, which is very insecure and not recommended.

Accessing self-hosted services from outside the home can be a challenge, especially when dealing with CGNAT and having to forward ports from the router.

I'm running almost 30 containers on my home server at this point, and I'm extremely lazy when it comes to updating them.

I've wrote before about file managers for Android before, recently I found X-plore which makes it very easy to transfer files back and forth between Android and SMB network shares, once you understand how the UI works.

When working on a GitHub repo from different Linux hosts, I encountered an "insufficient permission" error when using git commands.

My situation was simple -- my server's media storage was filling up and I wanted to add more drives, but without having to keep track of which drive specific files were for Plex.

Home Assistant is an open source home automation solution that gives you local control over your smart home.

Something a little different.

Self-hosting a static web blog has never been easier thanks to Cloudflare Tunnel.

I've been wanting to get a Raspberry Pi for ages, but they were out of stock for the longest time, so I never ended up with one.

Setting up SMB shares is fairly easy, but I do it so infrequently I often forget the steps and need to look them up anyway.

I've been using OpenMediaVault 6 for over a year now, and it's user interface can be a bit obtuse, so I wrote myself a series of quick step-by-step guides for enabling certain features within the OMV workbench UI.

A quick guide on configuring Pi-Hole to use either Cloudflared or Unbound as forwarding resolver to Quad9, for encrypted queries using DNS over TLS.

Cloudflare Tunnels have been around for a few years and are well regarded alternatives for VPNs or port-forwarding on a router.

My scenario was simple: I wanted to access the web GUIs of OpenMediaVault, Plex and Navidrome via a URL like plex.home.arpa without having to remember IPs and ports, inside my home network only and without the need for SSL/HTTPS.

When using Pi-Hole as a network-wide ad blocker, your DNS requests still go out in plain text and can be seen by your ISP.

Google Photos began limiting free storage back in 2021, limiting you to 15 GB of storage when uploading photos in their original size uncompressed.

Sometimes I use laptops in the home lab, and to save myself on a few watts of power usage I use these terminal commands to turn off the display, then just SSH into it from my PC.

Configure an Ubuntu machine to autologin and go straight into the terminal on boot.

I'd been meaning to play around with Deno and finally got around to doing it in the quickest, easiest (and laziest) way possible -- using a minimal blog template.

There are many File Managers/File Explorers on the Google Play Store, but I wanted to easily access the Samba share on my server while on my home network.

FileBrowser is a self-hosted file manager for a specified directory in a Linux machine that lets you upload, download, move, copy, create, delete, rename, and edit your files in a nice web interface through your browser.

Generating and using a GPG key is not difficult, but every time I need to remember how to do it to sign my commits from a new machine, I need to go through several pages of explanation on GitHub.

Network File Share or NFS allows sharing directories between Linux hosts on the same network, similar to Samba though it has better performance with small and medium-sized files comparatively.

When running a headless home server, you may want to set up a monitoring solution to keep track of your server's performance.

Plex is a popular media server for self-hosting, but it's not open source and recently locked the ability to remotely stream your own content behind a paywall, so one cannot be blamed for seeking an alternative to Plex.

Plex Media Server is one of the most popular services to self-host since serves your personal media library -- videos, music and even photos -- with a nice Netflix-like UI.

If you want your Linux machine to stay up-to-date on important security updates, but you don't want to SSH into it all the time to run updates and would rather set it and forget it, this is the way.