pfSense vs OPNsense in 2026
Two FreeBSD firewall distros, one bitter fork. pfSense vs OPNsense in 2026 — which one to pick for your home lab, and why the licensing drama still matters.
Tag: self-hosting
All the articles with the tag "self-hosting".
Zeek for Home Lab Forensics
Zeek (formerly Bro) turns network traffic into structured logs you can actually query. The IDS that doesn't shout — it documents. Setup and use in a home lab.
Neo4j vs ArangoDB: Graph DB Showdown
Neo4j is the household graph DB with Cypher. ArangoDB is multi-model with AQL and free clustering. Here's which one fits your homelab graph use case.
ModSecurity vs Coraza WAF
ModSecurity 3 is end-of-life and Coraza is the open-source successor — Go-native, faster, and friendlier. Here's the migration story and what actually changes.
Photon vs ESPHome: ESP Firmware Compared
Particle Photon 2 vs ESPHome for ESP32 projects: cloud lock-in, OTA updates, Home Assistant integration, and which firmware wins for self-hosters long-term.
Postgres vs SQLite for Home Lab Apps
SQLite is brilliant until you need concurrent writes, replication, or online migrations. Here's the actual line where Postgres earns its keep.
SOPS + age: Secrets in Git
Stop the .env-in-1Password dance. SOPS encrypts secrets per-key, age provides modern crypto, and git stores them safely. Here's how to ship it without footguns.
Self-Host a Local AI Coding Workhorse
Self-host Gemma 4 or Qwen3-Coder via Ollama or llama.cpp in Docker, then let Claude delegate the grunt work to it. Free tokens, zero code leakage.
WebAuthn & Passkeys for Sysadmins
Passkeys finally killed passwords for real users. Here's what WebAuthn actually is under the hood, and how to roll passkeys out on your self-hosted services.
Give Your AI Agent a Cheap Intern
Stop burning expensive AI tokens on boring grunt work. The overseer/workhorse pattern routes mechanical tasks to a cheap model and saves more than you'd think.
Borg vs Duplicacy: Dedup Backup Wars
Borg is open-source classic with SSH targets. Duplicacy has lock-free multi-source magic but commercial GUI. Here's which backup tool to pick.
Owntracks + Home Assistant: Private Location Tracking
Stop feeding Google your daily commute. OwnTracks + MQTT broker + Home Assistant gives you real presence detection without the surveillance capitalism overhead.