This one looked like it should take about thirty seconds. My Synology NAS had moved to a new static IP address. One of my Proxmox storage entries still pointed at the old address. So I did the obvious thing: Proxmox…
MQTT is one of those services that quietly becomes more important the longer you use it. At first, I was only using it for a few simple messages. Then more things started depending on it. The Raspberry Pi used it.…
Publishing Home Assistant through Cloudflare Tunnel looked like it should be straightforward. I already had Cloudflare Tunnel working for other Realm Labs services, so the basic path was familiar: The tunnel connected. The hostname resolved. Cloudflare could reach the server.…
One of the more frustrating storage problems I hit in Realm Labs looked like a permissions issue at first. The Synology NAS was online. The NFS share existed. The client could reach the NAS. The export configuration looked right. But…
Sometimes a network change looks so simple that you don’t expect it to cause any trouble. This was one of those changes. I had an older HP ProCurve 2810G-24 acting as the core switch in Realm Labs. It had been…
This one was painful because the symptoms made it look like the entire domain was falling apart. I had a Windows domain environment running in Realm Labs and wanted domain-joined machines to automatically bring up a WireGuard tunnel at startup.…
One of the more misleading problems I’ve hit in the Realm Labs setup started with Docker. Or at least, that’s what it looked like. I was trying to pull an image on one of my Raspberry Pis and Docker simply…
After getting more and more of Realm Labs running on my Synology DS224+, I started looking at what else I could move onto it. WireGuard seemed like an obvious candidate. I was already using Docker extensively on the NAS, so…
Running Pi-hole in the home lab seemed like it should be a simple job. Deploy the container, point the network at it for DNS, and enjoy network-wide filtering. Instead, the container refused to start. The problem wasn’t Pi-hole. It wasn’t…
It provides managed Gigabit Ethernet, VLAN support, a proper command-line interface and remote management over SSH. For learning networking or building a more advanced home network, switches like this still have plenty of life left in them. This guide covers…
