tag: #homelab

Neko is a self-hosted virtual browser running inside Docker that streams its display to anyone with a URL via WebRTC. On paper that sounds like a curiosity. In practice it solves three operational problems I had been working around individually for years, with one tool, in one container.1

A chunk-store backup that was projected to take ten days for sixty six gigabytes. The protocol was CIFS over rsync. The fix was rclone over SFTP with parallel transfers. The same data, the same network, the same off-site target, moved 280 times faster. The reason is a protocol property that does not show up in any "which backup software" comparison but that decides whether your backup can actually finish before tomorrow.

When CVE-2026-31431 dropped on April 29 with a public proof-of-concept and no vendor patches available, every Linux machine in the homelab was affected. Two weeks later the OpenSSH GSSAPIKeyExchange flaw shipped as DSA-6204-1 and the question arose again. This post is the short writeup of how Ansible turned both incidents into routine work.

The FortiGate 100F arrived this week and slots into the homelab between the Fritz!Box modem and the MikroTik core router, adding real next-generation firewall capability to a routing-strong but inspection-light architecture.

Operating a homelab as an observant Jew raises questions that no modern operations manual addresses. Which jobs can run autonomously through Shabbat. Which alerts may wake me.

Access technology lives in silicon — not software.

Manual carrier eSIM provisioning on MikroTik 5G via LPA decoding.

Scoped forward-auth for homelab services using tinyauth.

A 128 GB microSD started throwing ETIMEDOUT on writes. Instead of binning it, I used f3 to prove it wasn't counterfeit, then dd to force the FTL into remapping its bad blocks. The card has been healthy for two months since. A field-report on diagnosing and reviving flash storage on Linux

Self-hosting SearXNG - architecture, gotchas, and threat-model honesty.