Homelab

Yes, you can build a self-healing, redundant distributed storage cluster using Ceph across three Linux nodes. It’s less painful than its reputation suggests, thanks to the modern cephadm tool. You get block storage (RBD) for VMs, a shared POSIX filesystem (CephFS) for many clients, and S3-compatible object storage if you want it. Your data survives the loss of any node, rebalances on its own when hardware changes, and scales from a homelab to petabyte production by adding more disks.

The Home Assistant Energy Dashboard shows you where your power comes from, where it goes, and what it costs. If you have solar panels and a battery, it’s the best way to track output, storage cycles, grid flow, and per-device use, all without your inverter maker’s cloud app.

Setup takes care, though. The dashboard wants specific sensor types with specific attributes. Get those wrong and you get blank graphs or wildly wrong numbers. Below: the sensor rules, how to wire up popular inverter and battery brands, the dashboard setup itself, and some custom sensors for deeper insight into your solar setup.

Yes. For many workloads, systemd-nspawn beats Docker on leanness, simplicity, and host integration. It shines on servers and homelabs where you want isolated environments without daemon overhead. You launch a container with one command, manage it with machinectl, and run it as a systemd service. All the tools already ship with every modern Linux system.

That said, Docker and nspawn solve slightly different problems. Knowing where each one wins makes the choice easy.

Caddy is the simplest reverse proxy for self-hosted services. It gets and renews TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt with zero config. Install the static binary, write a Caddyfile with three lines per service, and Caddy handles HTTPS, HTTP/2, OCSP stapling, and renewal on its own. That replaces hundreds of lines of Nginx config and separate Certbot cron jobs.

If you run even a handful of services on a home server or VPS, a reverse proxy with proper TLS is non-negotiable. Caddy makes this painless, so there’s no excuse to skip it.

Yes, a plain Debian 12 or Fedora Server install on cheap x86 hardware, or a Raspberry Pi 5, makes a better router than most consumer gear. It often beats boxes that cost twice as much. You need two network interfaces, a few config files, and about two hours. The result is a gateway with a real stateful firewall via nftables , proper DNS and DHCP from dnsmasq , and traffic shaping that works through CAKE SQM. Every config is plain text you can track in Git.

To connect two remote LANs over WireGuard , you configure a WireGuard peer on one gateway device at each site, set AllowedIPs to include the remote site’s subnet, enable IP forwarding on both gateways, and add routing so LAN clients send cross-site traffic through the tunnel. Once configured, every device on either LAN can reach devices on the other LAN transparently - no VPN client installation on individual machines. A single UDP port open on at least one side is all you need.