Real-world homelab projects covering infrastructure, virtualisation, networking, storage, monitoring and self-hosted services built and tested inside Realm Labs.
Synology SMB access denied even though Active Directory groups, GPOs and folder ACLs look correct? This real homelab case reveals the Advanced Share Permissions setting that fixed it.
A real MariaDB 10.11 to 12.3 upgrade on Synology, fixing WordPress's broken Docker network and scheduling verified nightly SQL backups before WUD updates.
How I migrated from Watchtower to What's Up Docker on Synology, with selective 02:00 auto-updates, Portainer, Telegram alerts and a real Plex update test.
My working Synology Docker watchdog: Watchtower checks selected Portainer containers at 2 AM, recreates updated images, and alerts via Telegram only on changes or failures.
A real homelab migration from Synology Docker to Proxmox LXCs: Grafana dashboards, Prometheus TSDB history, SNMP Exporter, Synology-hosted YAML sync, NFS gotchas, rollback and actual RAM savings.
A practical Samba AD homelab case study covering Windows Group Policy, Remote Desktop, firewall rules, local administrator permissions, secedit, SIDs and gpresult.
Using a Raspberry Pi as a permanent UART console and serial programmer for an ESP32-C3, with BOOT control, esptool flashing, stale-build protection and post-flash verification.
Grafana dashboards became painfully slow even though CPU and RAM looked fine. The real cause was a duplicate Docker MAC address on a Synology-hosted bridge network — and the fix exposed a useful lesson about stale neighbour entries too.
How I made the KITT Control Centre match Proxmox LXC CPU, RAM and disk figures by combining prometheus-pve-exporter with node_exporter, Prometheus and PromQL.
How I added RabbitMQ to my Proxmox homelab to queue reliable KITT and KARR text-to-speech jobs between my local AI server and Piper TTS.