Real-world homelab projects covering infrastructure, virtualisation, networking, storage, monitoring and self-hosted services built and tested inside Realm Labs.
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…
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.…
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…
A Pi-hole port 53 conflict was not what I expected when I tried to add network-wide DNS filtering to the Realm Labs home network. The plan seemed simple: deploy Pi-hole in Docker on the Synology DS224+, point the network at…
Changing the IP address of a Synology NAS sounds simple enough: change the address, update anything that points directly to the old address, and carry on. In practice, if the NAS provides DNS, LDAP/domain services, NFS and SMB, there can…
Move Eclipse Mosquitto from a Raspberry Pi to a Synology DS224+ using Docker and Portainer, with persistent storage, authentication, testing and practical MQTT examples.
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…