RAG for Your Homelab Wiki: Answers That Cite Their Source
Turn your homelab wiki into a cited Q&A endpoint with dependency-free Node: retrieve-then-generate, every answer naming its source page, stale ones labelled.
Real Screenshots, Zero Leaks: My Disposable Demo Lab
How this site captures real, publish-safe homelab screenshots — a throwaway demo lab plus headless Chrome, with no mockups and no leaked IPs.
The Docker localhost Trap: 24 Hours of Red, Zero Real Downtime
My Uptime Kuma monitors logged 24 hours of red while every service was up. Inside a Docker container, localhost isn't your machine — here's why, and the fix.
What Is a NAS? (And Which Kind Your Homelab Actually Needs)
NAS explained in plain English — what network-attached storage does, commercial box vs DIY server vs a share on your Proxmox host, and how to choose the right one for your budget.
The Complete Proxmox Homelab Guide (2026)
A start-to-finish roadmap for building a Proxmox homelab: hardware, install, clustering, networking, storage, security, backups, and the self-hosted services worth running — each step linked to a full walkthrough.
Jellyseerr: Let Your Family Request Movies Themselves
Give your whole household a Netflix-style page to browse and request titles — Jellyseerr passes each approved request straight to Radarr and Sonarr, hands-free.
The Self-Healing Arr Stack: Why My Watchlist Silently Stopped Downloading
A real homelab incident — rotated API keys silently killed my Arr automation for days with zero errors. Here's the debugging story and the four patterns that make media automation immune to it: runtime keys, one consolidated script, an auto-detecting VPN-leak check, and a dead-man's-switch alert.
How to Set Up Traefik with Let's Encrypt
A hands-on walkthrough: deploy Traefik v3 with Docker, get automatic browser-trusted HTTPS from Let's Encrypt, redirect all HTTP to HTTPS, and route your first service to a clean domain using labels.
10 Mistakes I Made Building a Homelab Second Brain (And How Each Got Fixed)
What went wrong — and why — as I built a canonical Git vault, AI agent skills, write locks, and projection consumers: silent data loss, hanging CLIs, restore gaps, and the one mistake I made twice.
Your First Docker Compose Stack: From Zero to a Running Service
A true beginner's guide to Docker Compose. Learn what images, containers, ports, and volumes actually are by deploying your first real service — the foundation every self-hosted app is built on.
Run Home Assistant on Proxmox the Right Way (HAOS in a VM)
The correct way to run Home Assistant in a Proxmox homelab: Home Assistant OS in a dedicated VM, installed with the community helper script. Covers why a VM beats a container, and full onboarding.
Shared Storage for Your Homelab: Samba and NFS File Shares Done Right
How to set up network file shares in a Proxmox homelab using Samba (for Windows/macOS) and NFS (for Linux). A beginner guide to a central file server your media, photos, and backups can all read from.
One Dashboard for Your Whole Homelab: Set Up Homepage
Stop bookmarking IP addresses. Set up Homepage — a fast, self-hosted dashboard that puts every homelab service, live status, and system stats on one clean start page. Beginner Docker Compose guide.
Self-Host Your Photos with Immich: A Private Google Photos Alternative
Replace Google Photos with Immich on your Proxmox homelab. A beginner guide to installing Immich with Docker Compose, automatic phone backup, AI face and object search — all running on hardware you own.
Make Your AI Agents Read the Docs First, Every Time
Give your AI agents a revision-labeled cold start against your knowledge vault — verify the canonical commit, load only the pages the task needs, fail closed on mismatch, and persist outcomes through the controlled writer.
Why Auto-Syncing Your Notes Repo Will Corrupt It
Blanket auto-sync corrupts a canonical knowledge base. Replace it with a controlled write: lock, validate, commit, refresh projections, verify, unlock — so every change is atomic and every projection stays coherent.
Never Lose a Homelab Note Again: A Git + Markdown Vault
Build a homelab knowledge base on Git and Markdown — the substrate that gives you version history, plain-text durability, and one authoritative copy. Includes the SSHFS-over-bashrc mount pattern.
Your Homelab Needs a Second Brain — Here's Why
You've solved the same homelab problem three times because you forgot how you fixed it. Here's the case for a single source of truth — and the payoff that compounds over years.
Never Move a Note When a Project Ends
When a project ends, don't move its notes to an archive folder — you break every link and bookmark pointing at them. Put lifecycle in frontmatter, not the file path.
Semantic Search for Your Notes, Running Locally
Give your knowledge vault semantic search with a local embeddings index — built on Ollama and nomic-embed-text, cached by content hash, and labeled with the commit it was built from so staleness is always visible.
Share Your Vault Across Machines Without Split-Brain
Your laptop, your cluster, and your agents all need the vault — but only one copy can be authoritative. Use a direct mount for editing and a read-only forced-command SSH reader for everyone else.
Prove Your Homelab Docs Are Actually Up to Date
A knowledge base with many derived views is only trustworthy if every view proves it's current. The operations chapter: consumer parity, commit-matching health checks, a backup mirror, and correct failure behavior.
Already Made a Mess of Your Notes? Here's the Fix
Already have split-brain repos, a secret in history, and pages moved on a whim? The recovery playbook: quarantine divergent copies, pick one authority, reconcile, and rebuild every projection clean.
Never Commit a Secret to Your Knowledge Base
Never commit a password to your knowledge base — and if you already have, scrubbing it from the working tree isn't enough. Here's the store-pointers-not-values rule and the Git history purge.
Turn a Pile of Notes Into a Connected Brain
Turn a flat pile of Markdown notes into a connected graph. Model topics as neurons and links as synapses, then generate the maps and region tags automatically from frontmatter.
Turn Your Git Vault Into a Searchable Wiki.js Site
Derive a published Wiki.js site from your Git vault as a read-only projection — one that reports the exact commit it was built from and cascades deletes so it never drifts from the source.
Uptime Kuma: Dead-Simple Homelab Monitoring Before You Touch Grafana
Uptime Kuma is the easiest way to monitor your homelab — know the moment a service goes down, with notifications to your phone. A beginner Docker guide to up/down monitoring and status pages.
Install Jellyfin on a NAS or Proxmox LXC
Set up the free, open-source Jellyfin media server on a NAS or in a Proxmox LXC container, run the first-time wizard, and build your first movie and TV libraries.
Plex vs Jellyfin: Which Media Server Should You Run?
A practical 2026 comparison of Plex and Jellyfin — pricing, remote access, hardware transcoding, apps, and privacy — to help you pick the right self-hosted media server.
Automating the Arr Stack: Import Lists, Quality Profiles, Media Server
Make the *arr stack hands-off — import lists that add titles automatically, quality profiles that grab the best release, and a notification that refreshes Plex or Jellyfin on import.
Deploy the Arr Stack with Docker Compose (Prowlarr, Radarr, Sonarr)
Stand up the full *arr stack in Docker Compose — Prowlarr, Radarr, Sonarr, and a VPN-shielded download client — with the single-root folder layout that enables instant hardlink imports.
What Is the Arr Stack? Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr Explained
A plain-English guide to the *arr stack — what Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr each do, how they fit together, and how the automated media pipeline actually works.
Plex Direct Play and Transcoding on Weak Hardware
Why Plex stutters on low-power CPUs, how Direct Play avoids transcoding entirely, and how to tune Plex so 4K files play smoothly without a beefy processor.
Organizing a Plex Library: Naming, Agents, and Metadata
Name movie and TV files so Plex matches them automatically, pick the right metadata agents, and fix wrong titles and broken sort order in an existing library.
Install Plex Media Server on a NAS or Proxmox LXC
Set up Plex Media Server on a NAS or in a Proxmox LXC container, claim it to your account, and build your first movie and TV libraries the right way.
Docker on Proxmox: LXC vs VM, Done Right
The right way to run Docker on Proxmox — why a dedicated VM beats a privileged LXC, how to set both up, and Portainer for a web UI. Avoid the docker-in-LXC pitfalls that cost real downtime.
Pi-hole on Proxmox LXC: Network-Wide DNS and Ad Blocking
Run Pi-hole in a Proxmox LXC container for network-wide ad blocking and local DNS — install it, point your router at it, add local hostnames, and avoid the one mistake that takes your whole network offline.
What Is Traefik? Reverse Proxies Explained for Homelabs
What a reverse proxy does, why every homelab needs one, and how Traefik gives your self-hosted services clean HTTPS URLs with automatic certificates instead of a mess of IP addresses and ports.
Open WebUI Advanced: RAG, Pipelines, and Custom System Prompts
Go beyond basic chat with Open WebUI — set up Retrieval-Augmented Generation with local documents, configure pipeline tools, create specialized assistants with custom system prompts, and use the API for programmatic access.
Vaultwarden on Proxmox LXC: Self-Hosted Bitwarden-Compatible Password Manager
Deploy Vaultwarden (the lightweight Bitwarden-compatible server) in an unprivileged Proxmox LXC container with HTTPS, automatic backups, and mobile client access via Tailscale.
Wiki.js on Proxmox LXC: Self-Hosted Knowledge Base in 30 Minutes
Deploy Wiki.js in an unprivileged Proxmox LXC container with a PostgreSQL backend, HTTPS via a reverse proxy, and automatic backups — the exact setup powering this homelab's documentation.