Managing wallpapers and lock screens through Group Policy is straightforward when every machine receives the same image. It becomes more interesting when you want individual users to have different wallpapers, want to change images without editing scripts, and want a…
I recently revisited the lighting setup on my Executor model. The original system worked, but it had evolved into several separate Python scripts for turning the LEDs on, turning them off and running a breathing effect. It was functional, but…
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.…
Some of the best home lab problems are the ones that look completely ridiculous once you finally understand what happened. This was one of them. During the earlier versions of my Raspberry Pi TARDIS project, Node-RED was responsible for triggering…
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.…
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…
Remote Desktop is one of those Windows features that usually either works immediately or sends you down a permissions rabbit hole. This particular problem came up in Realm Labs when I had a Windows machine joined to the order.realm domain…
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…
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…
