Systems tinkering
3D printing, Raspberry Pi, SBCs, OpenWrt, pfSense, Proxmox, Unraid, embedded devices, LTE/5G modules, routers, sensors, and other useful rabbit holes.
- Building a Local LLM Box That Doesn't Need Babysitting
A field note on assembling a small inference machine, putting Ubuntu Server on it, and getting a stack that runs stable for daily work without constant firefighting.
- Everything With a Battery Cooks in a Parked Car
I wanted parking-mode recording without wiring into the starter battery, in a car that bakes every summer and freezes every winter. Those two rules ruled out almost the entire off-the-shelf market and left me building a battery-less 4G dongle — and learning why truckers don't trust fuses.
- Fail Closed, Not Fast
One small default separates systems that survive reality from ones that only demo well: when a dependency dies, does your system keep going without it, or stop? For anything protective, the safe answer is the annoying one.
- I Built Cellular Routers Every Way. Then I Bought One.
For years I built 4G/5G routers from SBCs and x86 boards — CM4, PC Engines, Banana Pi, industrial mini-PCs — across a pile of cellular modems and WiFi cards on OpenWrt and Rooter. Here's what actually mattered, and why for anything I depend on I now just buy the vendor box.
- You Can't Hotfix Atoms
I have a folder of 3D models named like a codebase — v3, v4, v6, and one branch literally named .rej. I versioned physical parts exactly the way I version software, and the print bed taught me where the analogy breaks. The break is the lesson.
- The NVMe Specs That Actually Matter for a Homelab
Ignore the Gen4-versus-Gen5 number on the box. For a Proxmox box, two boring specs decide everything — and the retailer's spec table will happily lie to you about one of them.
- Migrating a ZFS pool to new drives in Proxmox
Moving a pool to bigger disks with zfs send/receive: build a fresh pool, replicate, destroy the old one, and rename — so Proxmox never notices.
- Passing physical disks to Proxmox VMs
How to give a VM direct access to a physical disk in Proxmox, and when you'd want to do that versus passing through the whole HBA controller.
- LVM Thin Pools in Proxmox
When to use LVM Thin instead of ZFS in Proxmox, how to set it up, and what over-provisioning actually means in practice.
- Creating a ZFS storage pool in Proxmox
How to add a ZFS pool to Proxmox VE and why it's the right storage backend for most homelab VM and container workloads.
- Identifying ZFS disks with /dev/disk/by-id/
Why /dev/sda is the wrong way to reference disks in ZFS, and how to use persistent identifiers to match pool members to physical drives.
- ZFS, BTRFS, and LVM in the Homelab: Picking a Filesystem Without Regret
A concise field guide to the three storage stacks every Proxmox homelab eventually has to choose between — and the gotchas that bite after the fact.