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Tinker Tuesday for June 9th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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Thanks for the detailed response!

What router OS are you planning on using for the Linux box?

Debian. Seems like I just need dnsmasq, nftables, wireguard and networkd to party.

Might convince myself glibc is too risky for an internet facing host and switch to Alpine.

You could use one of the technically-standard home networking wall panels, but they are NOT deep, and I wouldn't put much equipment in it if any at all.

Oh, I think I'd probably just put a patch panel on the wall so that the runs between the switch and the jacks don't directly tug on the switch itself. The switch could go in an 16U cabinet or some such.

and not have to worry about your equipment being out in the cold.

Actually, since we're planning to put our home gym in the garage (and no cars) y'all have convinced me that me and the machines would be a lot happier with a dessicant dehumidifier. Between that and an short cabinet with top exhaust we should be good. But I wouldn't have thought of this at all without posting!

Apple gear is particularly poorly behaving in terms of dealing with complex home networks. A lot of Apple/HomeKit/AirPlay stuff assumes a mostly flat LAN and can get grumpy across VLANs unless you set up mDNS/Bonjour reflection carefully... and I couldn't tell you how to do that, I'm still figuring it out myself. IoT devices that go straight to the cloud can probably do fine just with internet access.

I don't have much Apple gear and this sounds like one more reason not to start! Thanks ^_^

People love Proxmox, I have a soft spot for XCP-NG, not because I have any love for Xen but because their management and backup platforms are more flexible.

I used to virtualize stuff on my beefy box but moved away from it since taking stable and delta efficient backups was a lot more convoluted than I'd like. I ended up moving each service into its own user and hermetically sealing their dependencies to the user account so that a top-level kopia would take efficient enough snapshots. It's not quite nix-level but close enough that I should probably ask Claude to convert each one to a nix flake. (Some things like Immich are in docker and I just live with that, the important stuff is in a mapped filesystem anyway). Efficient matters because I rsync them off-site once a month. I plan to do the backups weekly once I have fiber with better upload speeds.

One thing you could do with your BEEFY linux box is run your own DNS, with ad-block capabilities.

I'm thinking this should live on the router since I'm a lot more likely to reboot or rebuild the beefy Linux box.