Author: Wes
-
Automated TLS Certificates: Let’s Encrypt Wildcards, ACME DNS-01 & Reverse Proxies
Manual SSL certificate generation, CSR generation, and cron-based renewals are completely obsolete. Modern homelab and production environments automate 100% of the certificate lifecycle using ACME challenge protocols. This guide explains…
-
Smart Home Infrastructure: Containerized Home Assistant, Zigbee2MQTT, and Matter
Proprietary cloud-locked smart home hubs present privacy concerns, vendor lock-in, and service outages when external internet access drops. The modern standard is an entirely local, self-hosted smart home core powered…
-
Modern Reverse Proxy Architecture: Caddy Server & Cloudflare Tunnels for Container Ingress
Directly exposing application container ports (e.g. :8080, :3000) to the local network or public internet introduces severe security risks, prevents centralized TLS termination, and complicates domain routing. Modern production homelabs…
-
Modern Dynamic DNS: Cloudflare API Automation & Split-Horizon Resolution
Before modern cloud APIs, dynamic DNS (DDNS) meant running obscure background daemons (like ddclient or inadyn) that scraped third-party IP reflection sites and pushed updates over unauthenticated protocols to free…
-
Modern Multi-Room Audio: Running Lyrion Music Server (LMS) in Docker
For dedicated audiophiles and homelab builders, the Logitech Media Server (formerly SqueezeCenter, now actively maintained as Lyrion Music Server / LMS) remains one of the finest, most responsive open-source multi-room…
-
Declarative Server Administration: Why We Avoid Web GUIs in Favor of GitOps, Tmux & Pure CLI
For decades, server administration tutorials frequently recommended web-based control panels—from monolithic tools like Webmin to container management dashboards and browser-based management dashboards. In modern homelab and production engineering, these tools…
-
Modern Linux SSD & NVMe Storage Optimizations: TRIM, Schedulers & Longevity
In the early days of consumer solid-state storage (circa 2012–2014), sysadmins frequently resorted to extreme manual tweaks: moving /var/log and /tmp into RAM (tmpfs), disabling journaling, and hacking fstab mount…
-
Modern Media Streaming: Jellyfin on Docker with Intel QuickSync & NVIDIA Hardware Transcoding
Dedicated Home Theater PCs (HTPCs) connected directly to living room displays with IR remotes are a relic of the past. Modern media distribution relies on centralized network streaming using Jellyfin.…