Hands-on projects built inside Realm Labs, including Raspberry Pi systems, self-hosted applications, dashboards, automation, networking and experimental software.
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 the compute foundation behind Realm Labs. It runs on a repurposed Shuttle DS81 named QuanChi and provides the virtualisation layer for Linux containers, Windows virtual machines, monitoring services and internal tools. What began as a convenient test…
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…
See how Realm Labs uses Docker and Portainer for self hosting, with repeatable Compose stacks, persistent storage, secure networking, updates and tested backups.
Building a home Active Directory domain was one of the bigger steps in turning Realm Labs from a collection of separate Windows PCs into something that behaves much more like a managed environment. Originally, every computer was effectively its own…
What started as an attempt to improve unreliable ISP Wi-Fi has gradually turned into the network backbone for the whole of Realm Labs. The original setup was fairly typical: a Virgin Media Hub providing routing and wireless coverage for the…