Notes

Investigations, writeups, and things I've looked into.

homelab30 May 202618 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.

engineering8 May 20264 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.

homelab24 Apr 202610 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.

homelab5 Apr 20266 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.

homelab2 Apr 20262 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.

homelab26 Mar 20263 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.