homelab 30 May 2026 18 min read
Load Testing - Unnecessary but Interesting
Discovering the stack's limits before real traffic did. Finding the ceiling, pushing past it, and the kernel that couldn't keep up.
Notes
Investigations, writeups, and things I've looked into.
engineering 8 May 2026 4 min read
composer dump-autoload is busy, I'll do it myself
A Friday night hotfix blocked by a 3-hour deployment pipeline. How classmap-authoritative autoloading made a missing PHP class invisible, and how to manually patch around it without installing anything on a production host.
homelab 24 Apr 2026 10 min read
The NAS that kept us awake
Building JS projects in your home folder on a btrfs NAS generates tens of thousands of indexed files and hundreds of Docker layers. Read-write NVMe cache meant every Docker build burned through laptop SSDs that weren't rated for it.
homelab 5 Apr 2026 6 min read
WireGuard throughput: from 5 Mbps to saturating the link
Investigating why remote users were getting 5 Mbps through a WireGuard tunnel despite 400+ Mbps available on both ends. MTU fragmentation, TCP congestion collapse, and UDP buffer exhaustion.
homelab 2 Apr 2026 2 min read
Deploying Authentik SSO across the homelab
Replacing per-service authentication with centralised SSO backed by Google OAuth. OIDC for Grafana, Immich, Portainer; forwardAuth for everything else.
homelab 26 Mar 2026 3 min read
How my internal services were exposed to the internet
Found that my *.internal.gread.uk services were publicly reachable via the VPS TCP proxy. Built a three-layer defence to fix it.