After moving Node-RED from my Raspberry Pi to my Synology NAS, I realised there was one part of the setup I had not rebuilt. Manual control. Most of the models in the lab are already controlled using MQTT, including KITT,…
Monitoring Realm Labs didn’t start as one big project. Like most things in the home lab, it grew. Initially, I just wanted to know whether a Raspberry Pi was getting hot. Then I wanted to know what Proxmox was doing.…
Portainer is probably one of the longest-running pieces of software in Realm Labs. Long before the current Synology, Proxmox, Home Assistant and centralised automation setup existed, I was already using Docker on a Raspberry Pi. And almost immediately, I put…
When I first started experimenting with Active Directory in Realm Labs, the obvious platform was Windows Server. That’s what Active Directory is built around, after all. I already had Windows Server running virtually under Proxmox, which gave me somewhere to…
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…
This one looked like a Docker Engine problem. It wasn’t. The host itself had a modern Docker installation, the daemon was running normally, and the API version was current. But one application still refused to start with an error along…
As Realm Labs grew, I already had Prometheus and Grafana giving me detailed metrics about the infrastructure. CPU load. Memory. Storage. Network interfaces. Service performance. That was useful, but it answered a very specific question: What I also wanted was…
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…
Docker permissions can be confusing enough on a normal Linux machine. Add a Synology NAS, an NFS share and containers running under different user IDs, and things get interesting very quickly. This particular problem appeared when I started storing application…
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…
