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New lab: What not to paste into an AI tool
AI chat tools are now part of many people's daily work. So is pasting things into them. This post introduces a new hands-on lab that lets you practice judging what is safe to send to an AI tool, and what to do when something sensitive has already gone out.
WizardTux· · 3 min read
Getting Started With Home Assistant: Hardware, Wyze Devices and First Projects
I'm new to Home Assistant and have some Wyze devices. Here is my starting plan, the problems I hope it solves, and the questions I want your help with, especially about hardware.
WizardTux· · 5 min read
Photo by Alex Cheung on UnsplashScheduling ZFS Scrubs and SMART Tests, and Getting Alerted When They Fail
A ZFS pool can sit degraded for weeks if nothing tells you. Here is how I'm setting up scrubs, SMART tests, and a dead-simple heartbeat so a bad disk doesn't wait for me to look.
PriyaInTheCloset· · 7 min read
Photo by Volkan Olmez on UnsplashSubnetting by Hand: The Block Size Method for Any Prefix Length
You can find the network, broadcast and usable range of any IPv4 address with one subtraction and a bit of counting. Here is the block size method, with worked examples and the usual mistakes.
RackGhostDwayne· · 5 min read
Photo by Clint Patterson on UnsplashThis Week in Tech: GitLab and Drupal Exploits, Supply Chain Scares, AI Launches
This roundup covers the stories from the past week that matter most to admins and home-lab builders.
WizardTux· · 5 min read
Photo by Mohammad Rahmani on UnsplashLate to Docker, and Why I Now Build Almost Everything With It
A short history of Docker, what it was like arriving years after everyone else, and the habits that make containers worth using for home labs and day-to-day builds.
WizardTux· · 6 min read
Photo by Wonderlane on UnsplashHow Hands-On Labs Help You Learn IT Faster
Reading about IT only gets you so far. Learn why practice labs build real skill, how to get the most from them, and where to start with three IT Bible Labs.
WizardTux· · 6 min read
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on UnsplashWriting Firewall Rules for a Homelab IoT VLAN, One Allow at a Time
Creating a VLAN takes five minutes. The firewall rules are the real work. Here is the rule order I use for an IoT VLAN, how I test it, and the parts I'm still unsure about.
PriyaInTheCloset· · 4 min read
Photo by Matt Wang on UnsplashDocker for Beginners: Pull, Clone and Build Your First Containers
This guide walks through three ways to get a container running: pulling a ready-made image from Docker Hub, using a project hosted on GitHub, and building an image yourself from a Dockerfile. By the e...
WizardTux· · 4 min read