SumGuy's Ramblings

Redis went source-available, then back to AGPL.

Compare pg_dump, pgBackRest, and WAL-G for Postgres backups.

Docker volumes, version pinning, health checks, and tuning.

Remote console without IPMI: compare PiKVM, JetKVM, and DIY solutions, hardware costs, BIOS access, latency, and when to pick each.

Pick the right rack for your homelab: open frame vs 4-post vs wall-mount.

Skip Cisco.

Pick the right IT-mode HBA for ZFS: LSI 9211-8i vs 9300-16i vs 9400 series.

Remote management 101: IPMI, iDRAC, iLO basics, network isolation, security, and redfish.

Calculate true energy costs: watts, kWh, BTU output, and 5-year TCO for homelab hardware swaps.

Used enterprise-grade managed switches under $100: Aruba, Brocade, MikroTik picks, VLAN setup, wattage, and gotchas for home lab networks.

Noctua fans, IPMI curves, and undervolting techniques to make rackmount servers bedroom-quiet without thermal compromise.

Master UPS sizing math: VA vs watts, runtime calculations, battery replacement costs, NUT monitoring, and when EcoFlow beats enterprise hardware.

Raspberry Pi 5 vs Mini PC: when ARM wins, real costs with NVMe HATs, power consumption, performance, and ecosystem trade-offs for your home lab.

Head-to-head benchmarks: Intel N100/N305 vs Ryzen 7000 mini PCs.

Dell R630/R730, SuperMicro buyer's guide.

Tasmota vs ESPHome: broader device support, MQTT-native approach, and when legacy Sonoff/Shelly gear demands Tasmota instead

Store years of sensor data with InfluxDB.

Build a DIY NVR with Reolink PoE cameras and Frigate.

When Coral USB isn't enough: GPU and OpenVINO detector performance, config gotchas, hardware picks for home lab NVR

Mosquitto vs EMQX: lightweight vs enterprise MQTT brokers.

Garrul's 2026-05-25 roadmap promised moderation tools, a faster widget, and admin polish. 89 days and 53 releases later, here is the honest scorecard.

Head-to-head comparison of Unmanic and Tdarr transcode pipelines, config style, plugins, workers, GPU support, and when to pick each.

Batch transcode h264 to h265 or AV1 with Tdarr.

Power monitoring with Shelly EM/Pro/3EM, Home Assistant energy dashboard, circuit-level metering, solar+grid tracking, and wiring sanity checks.

Z-Wave vs Zigbee: range, mesh, cost, and which radio protocol to choose for home automation in 2026.

Matter and Thread protocol overview: what actually works in home labs, what's vaporware, and why you should be skeptical of the hype in 2026.

HyperDX (ClickHouse, session replay) vs OpenObserve (Rust, cheap object storage), two modern self-hosted observability platforms compared for homelabbers.

A security audit of Garrul, my Cloudflare Workers comment system, found 2 critical bugs.

Home Assistant disaster recovery: off-site backups, secrets handling, Z2M coordinator, restore drills that catch missing pieces.

Run several Claude Code accounts on one Linux machine.

Self-hosted ebook library showdown: Calibre-Web vs Kavita.

Navidrome vs Funkwhale for self-hosted music streaming.

Tautulli's notification webhooks, automation, transcode alerts, and custom triggers unlock Plex monitoring beyond leaderboards and statistics charts.

Overseerr vs Jellyseerr media request UIs: Plex-only vs Jellyfin/Emby.

Self-hosted *arr stack (Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Bazarr) with durable Docker Compose.

Set up Playwright synthetic monitoring: scheduled headless browser checks, login flow validation, and pass/fail metrics piped into Grafana dashboards.

VictoriaMetrics as a Prometheus drop-in replacement: lower RAM footprint, longer retention, better compression.

Which 30 Node Exporter metrics matter for Prometheus monitoring.

Self-host Grafana OnCall as a free PagerDuty alternative: escalation policies, Alertmanager webhooks, and phone alerts for your home lab (plus the 2026 catch).

Self-hosted Healthchecks.io for cron monitoring with dead-man-switch alerting, Docker setup, and backup integration.

Vector vs Fluent Bit log shippers: Rust-based transforms and sinks vs lightweight C agent.

Prometheus pull metrics are great until they aren't.

Blackbox exporter Prometheus probes HTTP TCP DNS ICMP synthetic monitoring without paying for Pingdom or SaaS uptime tools

SigNoz killed install.sh and its bundled Compose files.

SRE error budgets for home lab.

Master Alertmanager routing trees: severity labeling, inhibition, grouping, and multi-receiver logic for reliable home lab alerts that work at 3 AM

Distributed tracing with Tempo and Grafana for self-hosted multi-service stacks.

A WordPress login bot burned 90% of my Cloudflare Workers free tier in two hours attacking a site that has never run PHP.

Mimir for long-term Prometheus storage.

Promtail vs Vector: which log shipping agent fits your setup?