> Dan FoulkesDan Foulkes

Why Back Up a Portable Drive A portable Arch Linux install is a bespoke environment — your configs, tools, and setup exactly as you want them. Re-creating it from scratch is possible but painful....

BIOS Updates and Portable Arch: What to Expect BIOS updates are good practice — they ship security patches, AGESA microcode updates, and hardware fixes. They also, reliably, break things on a dua...

Why Secure Boot Matters for a Portable Drive If you have followed along with the [LUKS2 encryption article](/portable-linux-series/portable-arch-linux-luks-setup), your drive is now encrypted at ...

The Problem When I added the USW Pro Max 16 PoE to the network, I expected to immediately see 2.5Gbps transfers between the PC and the NAS. Both devices support it. Both were plugged into 2.5G po...

The Problem with Inter-VLAN Routing and NAT In the [previous article](/unifi-inter-vlan-routing), I configured L3 inter-VLAN routing on the USW Pro Max 16 PoE to bypass the Dream Machine SE's 1Gb...

The Problem My homelab is exposed to the internet through Cloudflare, with DNS A records pointing to my home IP. For a long time this was stable — the IP barely changed. Then my ISP moved to a ne...

Why High Availability? The standard K3s setup — the kind covered in the earlier [Pi Cluster series](/pi-cluster) — runs a single master node. That node holds the Kubernetes API server, the schedu...

Setting Up Loki on K3s for Centralised Log Aggregation Completing the Observability Stack My homelab runs a full observability stack: - Prometheus — metrics, scraped every 15 seconds - ...

Running Pi-hole on Kubernetes with Helm and MetalLB Why Pi-hole in Kubernetes? Pi-hole is the standard homelab DNS server — it blocks ads and trackers at the network level and lets you define...