Practical homelab builds for infrastructure engineers. This is where enterprise skills meet kit you can actually afford. Guides cover mini PC clusters, refurbished Dell and HPE servers, Proxmox hypervisor setups, network segmentation with VLANs, and the power and cooling tradeoffs that matter when you run 24/7 at home. Every build documented here has either sat in a production rack or a real spare bedroom. No theoretical gear lists, no affiliate filler. If you want to learn Kubernetes on a £120 refurbished OptiPlex or run a dozen self-hosted services on a Pi cluster, start here. The homelab is a professional development environment, and this is how we treat it.
Generate, install and use SSH keys on Ubuntu. Covers Ed25519 vs RSA, key permissions, ssh-copy-id, the authorized_keys file, and the agent.
SSH Key Authentication on Ubuntu: From Keygen to Login Read More »
Three reliable methods to enable SSH on Raspberry Pi. Works on Pi 4, Pi 5, Pi Zero, all Pi OS versions. Includes the headless boot-partition method for setups w
Enable SSH on Raspberry Pi: 3 Methods (Pi 4, Pi 5, Headless Setup) Read More »
Step-by-step SSH setup for Ubuntu Server. Covers 22.04, 24.04, and 26.04, including the systemd socket activation change in 24.04 that breaks most older tutorials.
Enable SSH on Ubuntu Server: Complete Setup Guide (22.04, 24.04, 26.04) Read More »
You have inherited a server, taken over a project, or just need to audit who has access. The first question: who has an account on this machine? Linux stores user information in a few well-defined places. Once you know where to look, listing users, checking their groups, and managing accounts becomes straightforward. Real terminal output,
How to List Users in Linux (and Manage User Accounts) Read More »
You have just SSH’d into a server and need to know what you are working with. Is it Ubuntu 22.04? Debian 12? CentOS Stream 9? The commands are simple but there are several options, and each reveals different information. This guide covers five methods to check your Linux distribution and version. All work over SSH,
How to Check Your Ubuntu and Linux Version (5 Quick Methods) Read More »
A weekend rabbit hole worth sharing. I stumbled across Project NOMAD a few days ago. It’s an open-source bundle (Apache 2.0, runs in Docker) that puts the useful parts of the internet on a Raspberry Pi or a mini-PC. The first thing that surprised me was that I’d never heard of it. The second was
Project NOMAD: Self-Hosted Internet in a Box for Practitioners Read More »
Gitea: Own Your Code, Track Your Infrastructure You have spent the last nine guides building something real. Docker containers, monitoring, automation workflows, reverse proxies, maybe even a Kubernetes cluster. Your Pi is running production services. Configuration files are scattered across directories. Compose files tuned through trial and error. Environment variables that took three attempts to
Gitea on Raspberry Pi 5: Self-Hosted Git for Your Homelab Infrastructure Read More »
n8n: Connect Everything With Visual Workflow Automation You have got a collection of services running on your Pi. Docker containers doing their thing. Uptime Kuma watching them. Ollama summarising text. Pi-hole filtering DNS. Each one works. None of them talk to each other. That is the difference between having containers and having infrastructure. Infrastructure is
n8n on Raspberry Pi 5: Visual Workflow Automation for Your Homelab Read More »
The hosting landscape has fundamentally changed in the last three years. If you last looked in 2022, you probably still think the choice is “shared hosting for a tenner a month, or a VPS if you’re technical.” In 2026 there are four realistic ways to put a website on the public internet, and the right
How to Host Your Own Website in 2026: Four Realistic Options Read More »
I posted on LinkedIn this week about building a homelab from e-waste. One laptop, zero pounds, a public webapp at the end. This is the technical write-up that the 3,000-character limit on LinkedIn couldn’t fit. If you want the short version of why, read the LinkedIn post. If you want the step-by-step of how a
Homelab From E-Waste: The Full Build Read More »
