Homelab on Fresh/Brewed

Cloudflare and Ngrok Tunnels

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I recently came across this Cloudflare blog article on Quick Tunnels. They seem like lightweight ngrok tunnels, but without needing any auth. The article suggested they were great to use with agentic flows, but I have a hard time these are things we get just for free - no account required.

We’ll look into Cloudflared Tunnels on the CLI, how we might set them up in Kubernetes then compare these things to what Ngrok has to offer.

OS Apps: Timezone, Swiish and VaultWarden

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I have a few apps on my todo list today. The first of which is this timezone app in Linux. I’ll try a few ways to install.

The next is Swiish which is an excellent containerized business card app.

Lastly, we’ll look at Bitwarden and Vaultwarden as I try to restore my OS secrets engine on the cluster.

But let’s start with a simple timezone app…

Timezone

I found this timezone app some time back and really wanted to get it a try.

OS Apps: GodAmp and Cloakbin

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Today we’ll look at a couple of interesting Open-source apps. Both have commercial offerings. The first is “GodAmp”, a modern dotnet-based audio player meant to look and feel like Winamp. While it may not have all the features (yet) of the original, I would argue it’s close to whipping the llama’s rump. To compare, we’ll also look at QMMP and Audacious (in an effort to get the best Winamp experience in Linux)

OpenBao in k8s

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I get caught up sometimes on LinkedIn posts and i was directed to this one by Andreas Prins posted Sept 22 about new rancher charts for OpenBao.

That seems really sweet. I love Rancher K3s and so i immediately wanted to dig in. I plan to setup OpenBao in K3s then focus on JWT/OIDC authentication with Authentik as well as CLI usage locally.

However, we may be in for a rough start…

Home lab maintenance: certs and more certs

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I noticed recently that I was getting billed $2.50 monthly for IONOS for “DNS Pro”. Seems this is a mandatory add-in on domains and I only discovered it when a payment was rejected and I was pinged about it in email.

So these cheap domains IONOS provides really aren’t when you figure you’ll get bilked for $2.50/month ($30/year) to just exist - I wasn’t even using their DNS (all external).

OS Apps: JSPaint, Shiori, SnapOtter

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

You know you secretly liked MS Paint. So did I and now there is a solid fast platform independent Open Source alternative called JSPaint. We’ll look into using it to make some diagrams and see if it can fit our needs.

I also wanted to check out, or rather circle back to, Shiori. It’s a bookmark tool but also it can download web pages and save them locally. It has a “create a book” feature I want to explore.

Idp with Authelia

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

We took a look at Authentik recently that provides a nice centralized authentication and authorization solution that is Open Source and self-hosted. But there are other options out there.

One that caught my attention is Authelia.

Setup

I plan to skip docker and just start with Kubernetes. Since I need to route traffic in, I’ll need a DNS record. I can create that easily in Azure DNS

$ az account set --subscription "Pay-As-You-Go" && az network dns record-set a add-record -g idjdnsrg -z tpk.pw -a 76.156.69.232 -n authelia
{
  "ARecords": [
    {
      "ipv4Address": "76.156.69.232"
    }
  ],
  "TTL": 3600,
  "etag": "d32fd44e-1b18-411c-83a5-722b1862bb18",
  "fqdn": "authelia.tpk.pw.",
  "id": "/subscriptions/d955c0ba-13dc-44cf-a29a-8fed74cbb22d/resourceGroups/idjdnsrg/providers/Microsoft.Network/dnszones/tpk.pw/A/authelia",
  "name": "authelia",
  "provisioningState": "Succeeded",
  "resourceGroup": "idjdnsrg",
  "targetResource": {},
  "trafficManagementProfile": {},
  "type": "Microsoft.Network/dnszones/A"
}

I want to now bring in the helm repo

Idp, locally, with Authentik

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Recently I saw this Marius post on self-hosting Authentik, an Open-Source Identity Provider system. He covered the container setup, but I wasn’t really sure what one could do with it.

Today we’ll look at launching it in Docker and Kubernetes. We’ll show some configuration options (as well as what is behind a paywall). Lastly, we’ll fire a up new Python based sample application (code provided) and walk through Authentik setup. Lastly, we’ll cover local users, usage and more before wrapping with some Databasus PostgreSQL backups.

Bye Windows

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Well I did it. It was a really strange feeling, to be honest, but I pulled the plug and wiped my windows SSD and finally loaded Linux on my last working Windows.

The gaming rig (whatever that has been at any given time) has always been Windows with WSL for fun and Steam for play. But every game is now supported quite well on Steam and I was tired of babying the 1Tb drive as my fun work in WSL was always bloating up the filesystem.

OS Apps: Databasus, CTRoadmap

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Let’s take a moment to check out some open source apps that have been on my list for a bit. The first is “Databasus” which is PostgreSQL/MySQL backup service that can run locally, in docker and in Kubernetes. We’re going to try backing up some PostgreSQL DBs as well as MariaDB 10 databases to a variety of endpoints.

A while back I saw this Marius post on CTRoadMap which describes itself as “Homelab Server Network Diagram & Documentation for Mapping Function Topology”. We’ll take a look at this and how to run in docker as well as externalizing with Kubernetes.

Getting started with FleetDM

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I was recently chatting with some colleagues about deployment tooling and FleetDM came up. I felt like I was aware of most deployment tools but this was new to me.

Logos are how companies show brands that use their products and of whom they are proud to share. So it is a severe negative to me they show Flock amongst their scrolling list.

But let’s still consider them as they are Open Source and easy to deploy

Gitea ist Kaput

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Gitea went kaput. Just up and stopped working one day. I came back from the BWCA and noticed none of my automated builds had succeeded:

The errors were all about “back pack header”

I tried many things - restarting Kubernetes, docker, upgrading the container image. All the things that usually ‘unstuck’ a Gitea instance just weren’t.

Any local pull or clone would fail

builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~/Workspaces/fbsnew$ git pull
fatal: protocol error: bad pack header

It wasn’t disk space

AI Code Reviews with Ollama

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

In recent times I have been looking closely into AI Code Reviews using tools like Github Copilot, which consumes my tokens and uses Azure/Microsoft resources. I have also looked at offerings from Qodo as well as CodeRabbit.

All these SaaS tool suites are great, no doubt, but they all cost money. I got to thinking, could I not accomplish the same thing locally?

Setup

I’ll want to use an Ollama host in my network.

Home Lab Updates

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

In moving our primary blogging system from Github over to a self hosted Gitea, we need to sort out how to best create a proper HA DR environment. This means having some push mirrors. The first thing I did when i setup Gitea to be the “real” repo for this blog was to mirror it to Forgejo. However that instance is on the same cluster, so if there is a catastrophic outage, then I would expect both to be down and have to rely on whatever my last local clone happens to be.