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Filed under

Homelab

42 entries

  1. Linux 10 min read

    The Command Said It Worked

    Five commands this site published reported success while doing nothing. A small container lab reproduces four, and the cheap defense is running each command once where it must fail.

  2. Software Engineering 5 min read

    One ZIP, Two Lists of Files

    A small reproducible ZIP lab shows why indexed and streaming readers can inspect different entries in the same archive.

  3. Virtualization 5 min read

    Two Processes, One Page Cache: Testing Shared State Before Blaming the VM

    A small Linux experiment separates shared file identity from identical bytes, with a failed tmpfs control and a careful look at a July 2026 VM-isolation preprint.

  4. AI 7 min read

    A Correct Answer Doesn’t Mean the Agent’s Memory Is Clean

    A synthetic memory-recovery drill shows why a correct task result and a clean derived state are separate checks.

  5. Research 5 min read

    Your Backup Administrator Should Not Be Able to Delete Yesterday

    Timelock Drive puts retention below a compromised host. An offline model shows why unfreezing a backup must start a countdown, not erase its protection.

  6. Storage 6 min read

    The Database Gets a Vote on Your Read-Only Agent

    A disposable PostgreSQL lab tests what an agent-facing database role can actually do, including the SELECT that writes through a privileged function.

  7. DevOps 13 min read

    The Sandbox Isolates the Agent. It Doesn’t Isolate the Secret.

    MicroVMs and namespace sandboxes give AI coding agents mature filesystem and process isolation. Most open-source ones still hand credentials to the agent directly. Here’s the proxy-injection pattern that fixes that, and what it doesn’t fix.

  8. Supply Chain 12 min read

    Patch Fast, Pull Slow: Defending in the Year of Copy Fail

    AI is finding bugs faster, researchers pile on the moment one drops, and registries ship malware by the hundred-thousand. Defenders are caught between two contradictory imperatives. The fix is architectural, not temporal.

  9. Hardware 10 min read

    Signed USB Rescue Boot: aegis-boot and the QEMU+OVMF Persona Harness

    A UEFI-Secure-Boot-preserving rescue USB for any ISO, and the companion QEMU harness that validates it against 11 hardware personas without physical Frameworks, ThinkPads, or Dells on a lab bench.

  10. Linux 8 min read

    Multiboxing EverQuest on Linux: Deterministic Wine Prefixes and Programmatic Window Layout

    I left Windows behind for good. Norrath-Native is an IaC-style toolkit that deploys EverQuest on Ubuntu 24.04 with Wine and DXVK, and a growing exploration into what you can actually do with programmatic window management on Linux.

  11. Supply Chain 6 min read

    Investigating the Trivy Supply Chain Compromise with AI Agents

    How I used AI-assisted investigation to triage the trivy-action supply chain attack across my homelab repos — and some thoughts on weekend incident response and community notification gaps.

  12. Virtualization 15 min read

    Building a Private Cloud in Your Homelab with Proxmox and Security Best Practices

    Learn to build and secure a production-grade private cloud using Proxmox VE. Covers network segmentation, backup strategies, security hardening, and resource management with real homelab implementation lessons.

  13. Container Security 17 min read

    Hardening Docker Containers in Your Homelab: A Defense-in-Depth Approach

    Eight security layers that stopped real attacks in homelab testing: minimal base images, user namespaces, seccomp profiles, network segmentation, and more. Defense-in-depth without Kubernetes overhead.

  14. Monitoring 15 min read

    Building a Homelab Security Dashboard with Grafana and Prometheus

    Real-world guide to monitoring security events in your homelab. Covers Prometheus configuration, Grafana dashboards, and alerting rules for threat detection.

  15. Container Security 11 min read

    NodeShield: Runtime SBOM Enforcement Stops 98% of Supply Chain Attacks

    NodeShield enforces SBOMs at runtime using CBOM policies to prevent supply chain attacks. Homelab Docker deployment guide with attack simulations, 98.3% prevention rate, and <1ms overhead.

  16. Threat Detection 10 min read

    LLM-Powered Security Alert Triage with Local Models

    Automate security alert analysis using local LLMs (Ollama) for privacy-preserving incident response. Reduce alert fatigue with AI-powered triage without cloud dependencies.

  17. Monitoring 6 min read

    PromSketch: What Sketch Algorithms Can and Cannot Do for Prometheus

    PromSketch accelerates *_over_time window aggregations by compiling into Prometheus as a library. What it covers, what it doesn’t, and why the distinction matters.

  18. Threat Detection 11 min read

    SIEM for Homelab: Wazuh vs Graylog Performance Comparison

    Deploy and benchmark Wazuh and Graylog SIEM solutions in your homelab. Performance analysis, resource usage, and integration patterns for security monitoring.

  19. Computational Science 34 min read

    Preparing Your Homelab for the Quantum Future: Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration

    Implement post-quantum cryptography with CRYSTALS-Kyber and Dilithium—prepare homelab for quantum threats using NIST-approved algorithms.

  20. Ethics 20 min read

    Building a Privacy-First AI Lab: Deploying Local LLMs Without Sacrificing Ethics

    Build privacy-first AI lab with local LLMs—run models up to 34B on RTX 3090 (24GB VRAM) with network isolation, traffic monitoring, and real privacy controls.

  21. Robotics 9 min read

    From Claude in Your Terminal to Robots in Your Workshop: The Embodied AI Revolution

    Deploy Vision-Language-Action models for embodied AI robots—integrate physical world interaction with security considerations for homelab automation.

  22. Virtualization 7 min read

    Proxmox High Availability Setup for Homelab Reliability

    Build Proxmox high-availability clusters with shared storage and automated failover—implement live migration for zero-downtime homelab maintenance.

  23. Hardware 8 min read

    IoT Security in Your Home Lab: Lessons from OWASP IoTGoat

    Test IoT security with OWASP IoTGoat—practice firmware extraction, API exploitation, and hardware hacking in secure lab environments.

  24. Zero Trust 16 min read

    Implementing Zero Trust Microsegmentation with VLANs

    Implement zero trust with VLAN segmentation—secure homelab networks using micro-segmentation and layer 3 firewalls for defense in depth.

  25. Privacy 14 min read

    Self-Hosted Password Manager Migration: Bitwarden Deep Dive

    Migrate to self-hosted Bitwarden—deploy secure vault with backup strategies, SSL certificates, and database encryption for full control.

  26. Threat Detection 16 min read

    Building a Network Traffic Analysis Lab with Suricata

    Deploy Suricata IDS/IPS for real-time network threat detection—configure rule management, performance tuning, and SIEM integration for homelab monitoring.

  27. Container Security 12 min read

    Docker Runtime Security Hardening with Linux Security Modules

    Harden Docker containers using AppArmor and SELinux for isolation without orchestration overhead. LSM profiles, seccomp filters, and capability dropping at homelab scale.

  28. Networking 5 min read

    Implementing DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) for Home Networks

    Choose where DNS-over-HTTPS belongs in a home network, distinguish browser and Pi-hole upstream encryption, and check fallback behavior.

  29. Privacy 8 min read

    Local LLM Deployment: Privacy-First Approach

    Deploy local LLMs for privacy-first AI—run language models on homelab hardware with model selection, optimization, and deployment strategies.

  30. Machine Learning 17 min read

    Fine-Tuning LLMs in the Homelab: A Practical Guide

    Fine-tune LLMs on homelab hardware with QLoRA and 4-bit quantization. Train Llama 3 8B models on RTX 3090 with dataset prep and optimization strategies.

  31. Professional Development 5 min read

    Building a Security-Focused Homelab: My Journey

    Build security-focused homelab with Proxmox, VLANs, and IDS/IPS—create testing environment for cybersecurity and family data protection.

  32. Privacy 6 min read

    Securing Your Personal AI/ML Experiments: A Practical Guide

    Secure personal AI experiments with model isolation and network segmentation—protect LLM deployments using privacy controls and threat modeling.

  33. Raspberry Pi 6 min read

    Raspberry Pi Security Projects That Actually Solve Problems

    Build Raspberry Pi security projects with Pi-hole, VPN gateway, and honeypots—deploy practical network monitoring and threat detection on budget hardware.

  34. Python 6 min read

    Automating Home Network Security with Python and Open Source Tools

    A homelab security automation design, with archived Python fragments and a corrected account of their dependencies and limitations.

  35. Raspberry Pi 15 min read

    Privacy-Preserving AI Training Across My Homelab: Federated Learning with Granular-Ball Computing

    Training an image classifier across four homelab devices without sharing raw images—what granular-ball federated learning actually costs in bandwidth, accuracy, and the privacy guarantees it does not give you.

  36. Hardware 16 min read

    GPU Power Monitoring in My Homelab: When Machine Learning Met My Electricity Bill

    What three months of instrumenting an RTX 3090 actually showed about the cost of running LLMs at home—including the optimizations that worked and the one that didn’t.

  37. Software Engineering 3 min read

    PizzaOps: How a Dumb LLM Experiment Became a Distributed System

    I asked an early LLM to build a pizza calculator to find out whether it could write working code. It could. Then it kept adding features nobody asked for, and I made the mistake of encouraging it.

  38. Container Security 12 min read

    Sandboxing Untrusted Containers with gVisor: Lessons from G-Fuzz Vulnerability Research

    Secure containers with gVisor sandboxing—prevent kernel exploits in Kubernetes clusters while managing 59% startup overhead for untrusted workloads.

  39. Edge Computing 14 min read

    Running LLaMA 2 on a Raspberry Pi: Memory-Efficient Edge AI with PIPELOAD

    Run LLaMA 2 on Raspberry Pi with PIPELOAD pipeline inference—achieve 90% memory reduction and deploy 7B models on 8GB edge devices at 2.5 tokens/sec.

  40. Privacy 9 min read

    Zero-Knowledge Proof Authentication for Homelab Services

    Implement privacy-preserving authentication using ZK-SNARKs for homelab SSO. No passwords transmitted, cryptographic proof of identity without revealing credentials.

  41. Machine Learning 16 min read

    Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): Enhancing LLMs with External Knowledge

    Build RAG systems with vector databases and semantic search—eliminate LLM hallucinations and ground responses in verified knowledge for trustworthy AI.

  42. Vulnerability Management 10 min read

    Building a Python Vulnerability Scanner with NVD API Integration

    Automate vulnerability detection in your homelab using Python and the National Vulnerability Database API. Track CVEs, scan dependencies, and integrate with monitoring systems.