Raspberry Pi MQTT Monitoring with Home Assistant
Monitor Raspberry Pi CPU, memory, disk, temperature and uptime in Home Assistant using Python and MQTT, with current Paho 2.x guidance and stale-data protection.
Category Guides
Practical step-by-step guides covering homelab infrastructure, networking, Windows, Linux, self-hosting, Raspberry Pi and automation, based on systems built and tested in Realm Labs.
What I Back Up Before a Major Proxmox Upgrade
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…
Rebuilding a Raspberry Pi Without Rebuilding the Entire Automation System
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…
Cleaning Up Years of Mapped Drive GPOs with %USERNAME%
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…
Migrating Node-RED from a Raspberry Pi Without Losing Its Hardware Functions
This guide shows how to migrate Node-RED Raspberry Pi hardware without losing GPIO, audio or local Python control. I moved the automation logic into a central Docker setup and left a lightweight MQTT agent on the Pi. At first, Node-RED…
Updating Portainer Without Losing Your Containers
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…
Deploying Applications with Group Policy: MSI Packages, PowerShell Startup Scripts, and the Problems We Hit
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…
Configuring the Raspberry Pi as a TARDIS Hardware Controller
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 Raspberry Pi Static IP Address with NetworkManager
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…
Centralising Homelab Messaging: Mosquitto MQTT on Synology
Move Eclipse Mosquitto from a Raspberry Pi to a Synology DS224+ using Docker and Portainer, with persistent storage, authentication, testing and practical MQTT examples.