Setting up a Raspberry Pi as a Tailscale subnet router and exit node gives you a powerful home VPN gateway that runs 24/7 on minimal power. I have deployed this exact setup for remote network access, helping family members bypass restrictive firewalls, and reaching home devices from anywhere in the world. This guide walks through … Read more
Setting up a Raspberry Pi used to mean dragging out a spare monitor, keyboard, and a tangle of HDMI cables. That changed when the community figured out how to headlessly set up a Raspberry Pi with SSH and Wi-Fi before first boot, so the board boots, joins your network, and exposes a remote shell without … Read more
Yes, you can run a low-power home server on a Raspberry Pi with Docker, and I have been running mine 24/7 for over two years. My setup pulls around 6 watts at idle, costs me about $11 a year in electricity, and hosts 23 Docker containers covering Pi-hole, Home Assistant, Nextcloud, a WireGuard VPN, and … Read more
Overclocking a Raspberry Pi 5 means pushing the BCM2712 CPU beyond its stock 2.4GHz default to extract more performance for emulation, AI, or server workloads. Active cooling is MANDATORY for any overclock attempt, and you must edit config.txt, choose a safe voltage, and run long stability tests before trusting the new speed. In this guide … Read more
A network-wide VPN gateway sits between your devices and the internet, encrypting every byte of traffic that flows through your home network. Instead of installing a VPN app on each phone, laptop, smart TV, and IoT gadget individually, the gateway handles encryption for all of them at once. The Raspberry Pi is a natural fit … Read more
When you build a ZFS pool, the very first decision you make will follow you for the life of that storage array. You have to choose how your data is distributed across drives, and that choice determines your usable capacity, your read and write speed, and how many drives you can lose before data is … Read more
Losing data is the one disaster every TrueNAS user dreads. Whether it is a failed drive, a accidental deletion, or a ransomware attack, having a second copy of your data on another system is the single most effective safeguard you can build. ZFS snapshots and TrueNAS replication make that process remarkably straightforward once you understand … Read more
Yes, you can expand a ZFS pool by adding a vdev without losing data. ZFS handles online capacity expansion through a single command, and your existing files stay exactly where they are while new data stripes across the larger pool. I have been running ZFS pools on TrueNAS, Proxmox, and plain Ubuntu for nearly a … Read more
Unraid parity errors are one of the most stressful things a home lab admin can face, especially when they show up out of nowhere after a clean shutdown. I have walked through this exact scenario on my own server, and I know how confusing it feels to see hundreds of millions of errors piling up … Read more
If you run Plex on Unraid and your CPU spikes to 100 percent every time someone starts a stream, you are probably transcoding on the CPU. Learning how to pass an iGPU to a Docker container in Unraid for Plex transcoding fixes that problem almost overnight. Your Intel processor’s integrated graphics can handle video encoding … Read more