Home Lab

20 parts

Standing up and running a real home lab on VMs — self-hosted services, monitoring, remote access, and the debugging each one dragged in.

  1. Debugging a Dead VMware NAT and Hardening My pfSense Containment Lab Jul 2026 · 7 min read
  2. Implementing LaMetric TIME to Network Jul 2026 · 7 min read
  3. Implementing LaMetric TIME to Network Part 2 Jul 2026 · 8 min read
  4. Building a Prometheus and Grafana Observability Stack for My Home Lab Jul 2026 · 6 min read
  5. Syncing Claude Code Across Devices with a Custom MCP Hub over Tailscale Jul 2026 · 6 min read
  6. Self-Hosted WireGuard Through a Nested Firewall — and the Four-Layer Debug to Make It Work Jul 2026 · 7 min read
  7. A Backup You Haven't Restored Is a Hypothesis Jul 2026 · 9 min read
  8. Metrics You Have to Remember to Look At Aren't Monitoring Jul 2026 · 12 min read
  9. Building a Homelab SIEM with Loki — Reading My Logs Instead of Hoping Jul 2026 · 7 min read
  10. Running OpenVAS in My Home Lab — Install, the Three Things That Broke, and the First Scan Jul 2026 · 11 min read
  11. A Front Door for the Home Lab Jul 2026 · 8 min read
  12. Building a Backup Watchdog in n8n — and Finding a Five-Day Outage While I Did It Jul 2026 · 13 min read
  13. Two VPNs, One Phone: Consolidating Remote Access Jul 2026 · 10 min read
  14. Implementing Langfuse to Monitor Claude Code Jul 2026 · 4 min read
  15. One DNS Filter, Three Clients That All Bypass It Differently Aug 2026 · 7 min read
  16. Patching a Homelab Has Two Halves — and Only One of Them Is apt Aug 2026 · 13 min read
  17. Auditing the AI Agent That Runs My Homelab Aug 2026 · 9 min read
  18. A Vulnerability Scan From Codex, a Container Upgrade From Claude Code Aug 2026 · 10 min read
  19. Three Agents, One Approval Gate — Making Claude, Codex and Kimi Review Each Other Aug 2026 · 11 min read
  20. The Council Gets a Front Door Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Programs built end-to-end by directing Claude Code — from a one-sentence spec to a hardened, packaged tool.

  1. Created a SystemInfo Grabber Program with Claude AI Jul 2026 · 4 min read
  2. Command Quest — I Got Claude to Build Me a Linux CLI Practice Game Jul 2026 · 4 min read
  3. A Read-Only Dashboard for My Obsidian Vault Aug 2026 · 6 min read
  4. LABDECK — Putting My Home Lab Dashboard on My Phone Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Locking the network down properly — segmentation, firewall rules and host hardening, every step proven rather than assumed.

  1. Hardening and Segmenting My Home Network on an Arcadyan HWG2025 Jun 2026 · 3 min read
  2. Hardening My Debian Home-Lab VM — Even Behind pfSense Jul 2026 · 6 min read
  3. Virtual VLAN Segmentation on pfSense — Three Isolated Zones, No Managed Switch Jul 2026 · 8 min read
  4. I Hardened This VM by Hand. Lynis Scored It 68/100. Jul 2026 · 7 min read

AAA

3 parts

Authentication, authorization, and accounting across the homelab — a self-hosted vault, then one identity provider with MFA everywhere, from web dashboards to the firewall's own login.

  1. Self-Hosting a Password Manager the Hard Way: Vaultwarden, Caddy, and Three Firewalls Fighting Jul 2026 · 11 min read
  2. One Login, MFA Everywhere: Adding an Identity Provider to the Homelab Jul 2026 · 9 min read
  3. Making the Firewall Authenticate Against My Identity Provider — and Proving the Bug Wasn't Mine Jul 2026 · 13 min read

The site itself as a project — a Hugo + Claude Code publishing pipeline, a move to Cloudflare Pages for real security headers, then a hardened domain of its own.

  1. Self-Hosting a Hugo Blog with a Claude Code Publishing Pipeline Jun 2026 · 3 min read
  2. Moving the Blog off GitHub Pages — for Real Security Headers Jul 2026 · 5 min read
  3. Registering My Own Domain: From a Pages Subdomain to billsblog.dev Jul 2026 · 5 min read

SPT Mods

2 parts

Reviving abandoned Single Player Tarkov mods — porting them onto modern APIs and hardening them for community release.

  1. Porting a TypeScript Game Mod to C# and Hardening It for Community Release Jun 2026 · 3 min read
  2. Porting a Mod Through Claude Fable 5 Jul 2026 · 5 min read

Claude embedded inside the apps themselves rather than driven from a terminal next to them — starting with the note vault where everything else gets written down first.

  1. Claudian: A Claude Agent Inside My Obsidian Vault Jul 2026 · 4 min read