Where We Left Off Part 13 ended with the VM up, the ISO built, and the file sitting on \\nixos2\isos visible from Windows. Clean stopping point. Then it hit me. I have a server running VMs. I have SSH. What I don't have is any way to see what's actually happening on the desktop — inside a VM, at the console, wherever —...

— Part 13 of Building a Resilient Home Server Series Where We Left Off Part 12 ended on a note of cautious optimism — Windows machine redone, Syncthing certs dropped back in, everything reconnected like nothing happened. The backup paid for itself before the post even went up, which felt like a win. Still on the to-do...

Where We Left Off Part 11 closed with a fairly ominous cliffhanger. I told you to back up your Syncthing certificates and said ask me how I know. Actually, don't. I'll tell you in a future post. This is that post. Part 12 has a few threads running through it: finishing off some things I'd been deferring (Homepage...

Where We Left Off Part 10 was about adding new services — SearXNG, LinkWarden, and a failed attempt at self-hosted RSS scraping. The stack was growing, and with it, some cracks were starting to show. My monitoring config was getting brittle (add a service, forget to update Prometheus, wonder why you didn't get an...

Where We Left Off By the end of Part 9, I had automated backups with Restic, Syncthing replicating everything to the second server, and a monitoring stack that would actually tell me when things went sideways. The server was doing what a server should do — running quietly in the background while I forgot about it....

Part 9 of "Building a Resilient Home Server" series Where We Left Off In Part 8, I got Vaultwarden running - self-hosted password management via Tailscale Funnel. My passwords were mine again, syncing to my server instead of someone else's datacenter. The server was doing its job: AdGuard Home blocking ads, Nextcloud...

The Survey Bitwarden sent me a survey about privacy and AI. What password manager do you use? What email service? What data wouldn't you share with AI - passwords, financial info, medical records? I filled it out. Checked every box for "keep AI away from this." Sent it in. Then I checked my Vaultwarden dashboard. I'd...

So I've got monitoring working, the disaster recovery ISO is solid, and everything's declarative. Now it's time to tackle something that's been bugging me: dependence on cloud services. Don't get me wrong - Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive - they're convenient. But you're trusting someone else with your files, paying monthly...

Part 6 of “Building a Resilient Home Server” Series Where We Left Off In Part 5, I added comprehensive monitoring to the server—Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Promtail, Alertmanager, and ntfy. The server could now tell me when things went wrong before I noticed them myself. But there was something else I’d been wanting to...

*Part 5 of "Building a Resilient Home Server" series* ## Where We Left Off In [Part 4]( I had a working NixOS server running AdGuard Home, Syncthing, Nginx, and Tailscale. Everything was humming along nicely, secured behind SSH keys and a properly configured firewall. The server was doing its job. But here's the thing:...

*Part 4 of "Building a Resilient Home Server" series* Where We Left Off In Part 3, we got the custom NixOS ISO working and deployed to real hardware. AdGuard Home was running, the server was stable, and I had a reproducible installation process. Victory, right? Well, sort of. The server was working, but it was still...

*Part 3 of "Building a Resilient Home Server" series*The Great Migration (and So Many Stairs) At the end of Part 2, I had a working NixOS VM with AdGuard Home, SSH, and basic Zsh configuration. The VM was my playground—safe to break, easy to restore. But the real goal was getting this onto actual hardware. I had an...

*Part 2 of "Building a Resilient Home Server" series* After my EndeavourOS server died, I decided to try NixOS for its declarative configuration and reproducibility. But I wasn't about to deploy straight to production hardware. Time to spin up a VM and learn. The VM Playground I installed NixOS 25.05 in VirtualBox with...

*Part 1 of "Building a Resilient Home Server" series* 4:00 PM on a Tuesday Generator maintenance. Annual checkup. The guy was just finishing up. Testing the handover from utility to generator, generator back to utility. Standard procedure. Then: streaming stopped mid-show. UPS units started screaming. Something was...