A while back I built a front door for the home lab — one Homepage dashboard listing every service, with live status dots. It’s the page I look at most. On a phone it’s a browser tab. It works, but it’s a shrunk web page: no icon, no native controls, and every visit is a fresh Authentik redirect. I wanted the same thing as an actual app. This is how that went, including the parts that didn’t work. ...
I wanted a DNS sinkhole in the lab — block ads, trackers, and adult content at the resolver instead of per-device. AdGuard Home is a single Go binary, so standing it up was maybe ten minutes. Then I spent the rest of the session learning that “point a device at the resolver” is a lie three times over. A Windows PC, an iPhone, and the lab host each route DNS somewhere I didn’t tell them to, for three completely different reasons. This is the write-up of finding all three. ...
I ended up with two VPNs into my homelab. WireGuard, running on my firewall, which I set up first. And Tailscale on my main server, which I added later so I could SSH in from a laptop without opening ports. Then I tried to use both from my phone and hit a wall. Phones only run one VPN at a time This isn’t a bug or a conflict between the two apps. iOS and Android both allow exactly one active VPN tunnel, full stop. It’s an OS-level restriction. ...
I run Claude Code on two machines: the Debian VM in my home lab (always on) and a Debian laptop (sleeps, roams, follows me to campus). I wanted the laptop to push notes, facts, and findings into a central store on the VM — from any network — so the home-lab agent could pick them up later. Claude Code’s built-in Remote Control turns a second device into a remote window onto one session. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted both machines to stay fully independent agents, linked through a shared tool. So I built a small MCP server on the VM and pointed the laptop’s Claude Code at it: the hub becomes just another tool the laptop can call. ...