Running Active Directory at home or in a lab environment normally suggests Windows Server, but that also brings Windows Server licensing into the equation. For a small lab, test environment, or isolated internal network, Samba can provide an Active Directory-compatible…
Raspberry Pi MQTT monitoring is a simple way to bring useful system health data into Home Assistant without installing a full monitoring platform on every device. In Realm Labs, Raspberry Pi systems often sit in the background running automation, scripts,…
Proxmox updates are usually straightforward. A few package updates, a reboot, and everything comes back. But major upgrades are different. When the hypervisor is hosting virtual machines, containers, storage mounts and parts of the home network, the last thing I…
Raspberry Pis are brilliant little machines, but after you’ve used one for a few years, they tend to accumulate jobs. A script gets added here. A cron job gets added there. A sound file lives in one directory. Node-RED controls…
One of the things I like about running Active Directory at home is that it gives me somewhere to experiment with the same sort of problems that appear in much larger environments. Mapped drives are a perfect example. They start…
One of the bigger changes in Realm Labs was moving Node-RED away from a Raspberry Pi and into a more centralised setup. At first, Node-RED had been running directly on the Pi because it was convenient. The Pi already handled:…
Portainer had become one of those tools in Realm Labs that I used constantly but rarely thought about. It sat there managing Docker, giving me a clean web interface for containers, images, volumes, networks and stacks. Then one day I…
Windows Group Policy makes it possible to centrally deploy applications to domain-joined PCs, but the traditional Software Installation policy has an important limitation: it is primarily designed around Windows Installer packages (.msi). During this project I wanted domain computers to…
The Raspberry Pi at the heart of my smart TARDIS project has gone through a few different roles. Originally, quite a lot of the automation ran directly on the Pi. As the wider home lab developed, the predictable scheduling and…
Changing the static IP address of a Raspberry Pi is straightforward when NetworkManager is managing the Ethernet connection. This guide covers changing the Pi from 192.168.68.88 to 192.168.68.30 while keeping the existing DNS server at 192.168.68.20. Before You Start Make…
