(in)Secure IT

ZFS Featured

Revamping My Homelab Network with AI Assistance: A Year with the UniFi Cloud Gateway Max (Part 1 – The Brainstorming Spark)

Hey everyone, it's January 10, 2026, and looking back, it's been almost exactly a year since I unboxed that UniFi Cloud Gateway Max on January 17, 2025. What started as a quick upgrade has turned into a quiet game-changer for my setup—mostly because life got

home assistant

Waiting for the Home Assistant CLI to be ready...

Let me start by saying that I've figured out a repeatable way to get around this issue which had stumped me all week! And, here's the proof: Let's back up a second and talk about what happened and what got us here. Previously, these

Proxmox VE

I restarted my homelab with Proxmox VE Helper-scripts and a phablet! - Part 3

Welcome back, it's literally been a minute since I published Part 2 of this series where I found a fix for the Pi-hole NTP sync errors. I don't think there's going to be a separate need to discuss blogging on Ghost via mobile. It

Proxmox VE

I restarted my homelab with Proxmox VE Helper-scripts and a phablet! - Part 2

Strike while the iron is hot? Well, I'm going to do a version of type on this phablet until it powers down because its now at 11% and hopefully not loose any content. I guess that is part of the curse when you've got the ideas

Proxmox VE

I restarted my homelab with Proxmox VE Helper-scripts and a phablet!

It's been a minute. We'll, several months in fact since getting most of the Lab situated. The Unifi gateway has proven to be a useful addition to complete the end-to-end visibility for my network. I've also walked myself back from over-engineering the access points,

Ghost

The 3rd Return from Being Offline

... and we're back !!! Today just so happened to be a standard month of setting-up shop in the new digs. Most of the boxes have been unpacked except for the holiday stuff. I don't think we knew how much decorations we'd amassed over the years

Proxmox VE

Installing Proxmox VE 8.x on ARM64 (NanoPi R5s)

This little journey started the night before Thanksgiving as we were packing for a long-ago planned trip to Japan. As is my usual wont, I found myself puttering around restlessly with the HomeLab trying to eek out a little bit more from the little bits of hardware I had accumulated

large action model

Large Action Models vs the Rabbit R1 (and others)

The Rabbit R1 was introduced during CES 2024 and it was probably one of the promised products that helped make the the term Large Action Models (LAM) more widely known compared to mainstream Large Language Models (LLM) and, to a degree, the future iteration which is Large Agentic Models (LAM)

AI PC

Meeting with some Copilot+ PCs left me unimpressed. Why?

Its literally been a week since I walked into a Costco and took notice of the electronics area. This is the normal store layout: beautiful 8k and 4k OLED displays first followed by some quick-selling items (that day it was golf shirts), turn the slight corner and you have the

UniFi

UniFi Cloud Key Gen2 Plus Protect Hardware Upgrade Tips

Some two-(2) years ago now, I posted a a video about a bunch of UniFi/Ubiquiti hardware that I'd suggested for purchase to better manage my research team's various network use remotely with the idea that there was no guarantee I would consistently be able

Ollama

Running Local LLMs on Older Hardware?

As part of this local LLM series, I wanted to know the lower limits of being able to self-host and potentially share demos or development frameworks with my team. Given the acceptable baseline discussion in my previous post, we'll use that to audition the hardware we come across.

SBC

Comparing the AI Capabilities of Single-Board Computers (SBCs)

During the start of the pandemic in 2020 and we were scrambling to do work-from-home set-ups, I recorded a short video on how to make an OPNsense/pfSense router using any spare desktop lying around and as many USB dongles you could get your hands on to extend your networking.

GPT-4o

Summary: GPT-4o vs Local Language Models Evaluation Results

This entry was intended to be Part-2 of my most recent report but realized on review that it is probably the natural follow-up to the other writings on the current state of LLMs (we've not even gone down the road of Small Language Models, yet!) in the first

GPT-4o Featured

Measuring Azure OpenAI GPT-4o vs Local LLM Models

Microsoft Build 2024 just concluded last week and one of the highlights was the catch-up release of OpenAI GPT-4o alongside a new hardware line-up of Copilot+ PCs running Windows on ARM with Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips under the hood. I'll address the huge x86 elephants that were in

Ghost

Lights at the end of the (Cloudflared) Tunnel

We'd had some marble sized hail in the afternoon, followed by a big storm last night which upturned the gazebo chair, and then the power went out which left me a bit stuck at home due to the weight of the garage doors. That being said, this site

Ghost

The 2nd Coming of this site (like a Ghost)

That's what it has been like getting this blog back online and having spent my whole Memorial Day weekend in front of the screens furiously trying to recover from a Proxmox VE 7.x hypervisor storage failure. It isn't my first rodeo using ZFS but it

Llama 3

Extending Llama-3 8B with 1-million context by Gradient

Wow, things are heating up on this latest Meta model. I was looking to turn things up a notch on my local LLM workflow which I finally got working and gotten usable responses using the llama3:latest model from Ollama. For some reason, llama3:text was giving me some loopy

Docker

LLM Workflows vs Docker Compose

If you've been doing any experiments or projects using Docker Compose and somehow your API calls bring you to the point of frustration with a "Connection error" message, such as: http://localhost:<port_number> Then, let me tell you a secret. I promise, it

n8n

n8n in Turnkey Linux Node.js

For those of us, like me, who are just getting back to full-stack and understanding the changes in the Node.js realm, this error is going to annoy you for sure. I'm simply trying to get a running latest n8n working with this command: npm install -g n8n@

Meta Llama 3

Meta Llama 3 vs Ollama Performance

In the middle of me taking on the challenge of a small full-stack project by my lonesome by rapidly developing a parallel alternative to one in production backed by more than a dozen engineers, I started looking to get a bit more embedding performance or alternatives to the "text-embedding-3-large&

Ollama

Ollama Performance Comparison Chart

I stumbled upon Ollama while looking for ways to run large language models (LLMs) locally for research at work some time last year during the initial explosion of the interest in ChatGPT. Being a long time Linux dabbler all my GPU have almost always been from Team Red (AMD)  unless

OpenCTI

How to fix OpenCTI Heat Map?

If you self-host an OpenCTI instance via Docker (the recommendation), you may run into the situation where the heat-map suddenly does not work. In some instances, it probably had never worked depending on where you got your build instructions. I'm probably on my 5th iteration and it has

ZimaOS

ZimaOS on Proxmox VE

I'm always on the lookout for compact ideas to beta test in my #homelab before deploying in my office network cluster. While scrolling through Kickstarter and YouTube for Raspberry Pi projects to extend the lifetime of my rPi 3B+ cluster, I came across IceWhale's CasaOS and

Lacus

Plumbing the Depths of Lacus

Now that we've gotten a fresh new instance of the AIL Project installed, it is time to setup the web crawler back-end that will help map out the deep and dark web using another project called Lacus – which is a partial snippet of a much larger project called

AIL Project

AIL Project 5.2 Adventures in a Linux Container

Coming out of the recent Virus Bulletin 2023 Small Talks in London, I was lucky to have been present and see more cybersecurity practitioners take notice of this cool project, especially from those who probably had never heard of it before (well, before me, at least!). Wanting to make a