A power blip shouldn’t mean your work call drops or your security cameras go dark. We tested 10 best budget UPS for a router and modem setups in our home lab, from a 425VA CyberPower brick to a 74Wh pocket-sized DC backup, and we measured how long each one actually kept a typical cable modem … Read more
Finding the best rack-mount UPS for a 10-inch mini rack is harder than it should be. Almost every rackmount UPS on the market is built for a 19-inch rack, and the few compact units that exist come with trade-offs in depth, runtime, or waveform quality. I ran into this exact wall when I built my … Read more
Power outages kill NAS filesystems. I learned this the hard way when a sudden blackout corrupted my ZFS pool during a scrub operation. The solution is a UPS with USB monitoring that enables TrueNAS to perform graceful shutdowns before the battery dies. TrueNAS uses Network UPS Tools (NUT) to communicate with UPS units via USB. … Read more
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