Nathan Reynolds

I run a 24/7 home lab with a rack-mounted NAS, two mini servers, a POE switch, and a small UPS. After watching a brownout take out a NAS power supply two summers ago, I started treating power protection as seriously as backups and cooling. That experience turned into this guide to the best surge protector … Read more

If you run a Jellyfin media server, you already know the pain of watching your CPU choke on multiple 4K streams. I have been running self-hosted media servers for over six years, and I have seen devices melt under software transcoding loads that a cheap dedicated GPU could handle in its sleep. After three months … Read more

Looking for the best OPNsense Mini PC with Intel i226-V NICs? I’ve spent the last three months testing eight compact fanless boxes on my home lab bench, pushing multi-gig traffic through Suricata IDS, OpenVPN, and WireGuard tunnels. The short version: the Intel i226-V 2.5GbE controller is the most stable NIC you can pair with OPNsense … Read more

Running Suricata IDS on a consumer router is a losing battle. I learned this the hard way after enabling the Emerging Threats ruleset on a basic Wi-Fi 6 router and watching the admin UI lock up within hours. The good news: a purpose-built firewall appliance for running Suricata IDS changes everything, giving you multi-core CPU, … Read more

I spent three weekends diagnosing why my Zigbee motion sensors kept dropping off the network. The fix turned out to be a $12 USB extension cable. If you run Home Assistant, Zigbee2MQTT, or any smart home hub with a Zigbee coordinator plugged directly into a mini PC or server, a USB extension cable for your … Read more

Running Docker on a single board computer used to mean squeezing containers into 4GB of RAM and praying nothing swapped. That changed when 16GB boards hit the market, and the math finally works: 16GB lets an SBC run 10 to 20 containers at once without breaking a sweat. After comparing the top boards and kits … Read more

I spent three months swapping eight different multi-gig switches in and out of my homelab rack, and the difference a good 2.5GbE managed switch makes is bigger than I expected. File transfers to my NAS jumped from around 118 MB/s on gigabit to a steady 260-290 MB/s, and being able to tag VLANs means my … Read more

Looking for the best 8-port 2.5GbE switch with 10G SFP+ uplinks in ? Our team spent the last 90 days testing 24 different multi-gigabit switches, pushing each one through real-world NAS transfers, sustained throughput benchmarks, and quiet-room fan noise tests. The right pick depends on whether you need managed VLANs, fanless silence, or just plug-and-play … Read more

A 10GbE SFP+ switch is a network switch that provides 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity through SFP+ ports, and it’s become the backbone of every serious storage network I’ve built over the last five years. When your gigabit switch becomes the bottleneck choking a multi-drive NAS array, a 10GbE SFP+ switch instantly unlocks the bandwidth that … Read more

Last year, I watched a friend’s smart home fall apart because a single compromised smart bulb started scanning his entire network. Within an hour, his laptop, NAS, and security cameras were all reachable from the same flat broadcast domain. The fix that would have prevented it costs less than a decent dinner: a managed switch … Read more