6posts
The smallest automation in the smart home is also one of the most useful: a Wake-on-LAN packet that spins a sleeping server back to life. A sysadmin read on WoL use cases, Home Assistant automations, coexisting with Zigbee smart plugs, waking on demand, and how to shut down gracefully without cutting power under load.
Your smart bulb does not need access to the network your laptop sits on, but walling it off the wrong way breaks discovery, onboarding, and voice control. Smart home VLAN segmentation from a sysadmin perspective: mDNS, firewall zones per layer, hub placement, and device classes that should never be walled off entirely.
Coding agents decide at runtime what to call, so the boundary has to sit outside the agent. A sysadmin's guide to default-deny egress: the agent sandbox defaults for Claude Code, Codex, ChatGPT Work, and Docker Sandboxes, the firewall and proxy layers that enforce allowlists, and where egress controls still leak.
A sysadmin's field guide to VPNs: what a VPN actually does to your traffic, the threat models it does and does not answer, how no-logs claims and audits really work, which providers pass the test, and a deep technical comparison of OpenVPN, WireGuard, and the proprietary protocols (NordLynx, Lightway, Catapult Hydra, Chameleon), plus a hands-on self-hosted WireGuard setup.
A sysadmin's hands-on walkthrough of a scratch-based, rootless Docker image for the SimpleX Chat CLI. Since the chat server binds 127.0.0.1 only (issue #6449 is still open), a small socat bridge exposes it on 0.0.0.0. Full multi-stage Dockerfile, build and run commands, and the honest trade-offs.
NetBird is a WireGuard mesh VPN; Pangolin + Newt is an identity-based remote access platform. An honest comparison of architecture, real commands, costs, and rough edges, from someone running one and evaluating the other.