Building infrastructure you own, understand, and can’t break.
KVM/QEMU Scripts and Aliases: Making Virtualization Actually Usable
I run VMs constantly. Testing Kubernetes deployments, trying out a distro I read about, running Windows for that one stubborn application, isolating an experiment so I don’t wreck my actual machine. KVM/QEMU is the right tool for all of it. Near-native performance, completely open source, baked straight into the Linux kernel. Nothing to phone home, nothing to license, no vendor deciding what I’m allowed to do with my own hardware. ...
Infrastructure as Code for People Who Need to Understand
Here is how a lot of infrastructure still gets built in 2026. Someone opens a cloud console, clicks through a wizard, picks some defaults, and a resource appears. It works. The dashboard turns green. Everyone moves on. I can’t work that way. When I click a button and infrastructure appears, I feel like I borrowed it. I want to see what’s happening, I want the configuration written down where I can read it back, and I want to know why something exists instead of just that it exists. The console gives me a green checkmark. It doesn’t give me understanding. ...
Backup Strategy for Your Homelab: The 3-2-1 Rule in Practice
Picture your homelab disk dying tonight. Not corrupting, not throwing SMART warnings for a week first, just gone. The GitLab that holds every repo you care about, the password vault, fifteen years of family photos, the home automation that runs your house. All of it on a drive that has decided it’s done. Can you answer what happens next without your stomach dropping? If not, you don’t have backups. You have hope, and hope is not a strategy you want to discover the limits of at 2am. ...
Terminal Multiplexing: tmux vs Zellij vs Screen
The first time it bit me I was halfway through a database migration over SSH. Train hit a tunnel, WiFi blinked, connection gone. The process running on the other end went with it. I sat there staring at a dead prompt wondering how much of the migration had actually committed. A terminal multiplexer would have saved me. The process keeps running on the server whether I’m attached or not, so a dropped connection becomes a non-event. I reconnect, reattach, and the work is exactly where I left it. That property alone is worth the setup cost, and it’s why I treat a multiplexer as part of the base layer on every machine I touch. ...
Tailscale for Homelab: Secure Remote Access Without Port Forwarding
My homelab cluster runs in a closet at home. I do not. I work from coffee shops, from a client office, sometimes from a hotel with WiFi that feels actively hostile. And I still want to reach my own machines while I’m out there. For years the standard answer to that was to poke holes in your own front door. Forward a port on the router, wire up dynamic DNS so the changing home IP doesn’t break everything, write firewall rules, and then sit with the quiet hope that nobody scanning the internet stumbles onto the SSH daemon you just exposed. It works, in the sense that you can reach your stuff. It also means a part of your private network is now answering questions from strangers, all day, forever. ...