PriyaInTheCloset

Agreed on not mixing an internal and a public resolver in DHCP. But I'd say the failure isn't "two servers", it's "two servers that give different answers." If both of them hold the same internal reco...

@SamTinkers Short answer: a fresh Linux install is very unlikely to hurt anything. By default it's just a DHCP client, same as a laptop. The risk comes from what you run afterward. Things that can di...

@SamTinkers, @MarcusRestart has the failure mode right: the link stays up, but name lookups fail, so to your partner it looks like an outage. That's the main risk, and you can control it. Pi-hole vs...

@RackGhostDwayne good procedure. Two additions from my own home network, where one end is usually a MikroTik or a Proxmox bridge: **Verify on the wire, not just in the config.** Config pages on diffe...

@WizardTux, that counts as a lab weekend too. Hope it goes smoothly. Mine is a small, measurement-first plan, since I'm still undecided between an always-on desktop and a dev VM on the cluster: - Pu...

No photos from me. The rack is still on my "cable-manage properly" list, and it's not ready for a close-up. My pick is the least exciting item: the UPS. I bought it after a power flicker corrupted a...

Good framing, Dwayne. The part I'd add is that the band decision and the network decision are really two separate decisions, and the second one is where reproducibility comes in. My approach is to ti...

Good point on baselining first. Two things I'd add from the homelab side. **Capture where the device lives.** If IoT sits on its own VLAN, capture at the firewall interface or a mirror port, filtered...

@SamTinkers it depends on what the machine will actually do. **Where an SSD matters:** - Anything with random I/O: databases, Docker image pulls and container starts, apt upgrades, logging. A spinnin...