One of the main goals behind Realm Labs is to run as much as possible on infrastructure I control. That naturally led to an interesting question: Could I host the Realm Labs website from my own homelab without exposing the…
RealmLabs is a website about building, breaking, fixing and improving technology, so hosting it on somebody else’s server always felt slightly at odds with the idea. Instead, I decided to make the website another part of the home lab. The…
I have had some form of homemade darts scorer kicking around since 2021. Like quite a few of my projects, it started with a fairly simple requirement: I wanted an electronic scoreboard beside the dartboard without spending silly money on…
Monitoring started out fairly simply in Realm Labs. At first, checking system health meant opening the individual management interface for whatever device I wanted to inspect. Proxmox had one dashboard. Synology had another. Windows had Task Manager. Home Assistant had…
Some of the most rewarding technology projects are the ones where engineering meets something completely unnecessary but genuinely fun. The Realm Labs TARDIS started as a static display model and gradually evolved into a network-connected automation project with programmable lighting,…
As Realm Labs grew, remote access became increasingly useful. There are plenty of services inside the lab that I normally access only from the local network: management interfaces, dashboards, shared resources and other internal systems. That is fine when I…
Proxmox VE is one of the core platforms behind Realm Labs. It provides the virtualisation layer for a growing collection of Linux containers, virtual machines, monitoring services and internal tools, all running from a single physical host. What started as…
Storage is one of those parts of a homelab that can quietly become critical without you really noticing it happening. At first, a NAS is somewhere to put files. Then a Raspberry Pi starts using it for backups. Docker applications…
Home Assistant started in Realm Labs as a way to control smart-home devices from one place. It has since grown into something much broader. Today it sits between home automation, homelab monitoring, MQTT, Raspberry Pi projects, virtual machines, storage and…
Self hosting is one of the main reasons Realm Labs grew from a collection of individual devices into a proper homelab. Rather than installing every application directly onto whatever machine happened to be available, I gradually moved services into Docker…
