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In-depth guides on storage health, SMART, ZFS, networking, backup, hardening, and homelab tooling. Grouped by topic. Written by sysadmins, fact-checked, no fluff.

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Ollama Download Stuck at 99 Percent: Causes and Workarounds

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/ollama-download-stuck-at-99-percent-causes-and-workarounds

Published: November 2, 2026 00:00

Why ollama pull crawls, freezes or sits at 100% for minutes, tested on Ollama 0.40.13: how a pull is split into parts and resumed, what a 60-second network stall does, why killing the client stops the download, where proxy settings must go, the sha256…

An Old Phone as a Remote Network Probe: Mail It to Your Parents, See Their Internet

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/old-phone-as-a-remote-network-probe

Published: November 1, 2026 00:00

A drawer phone running Termux can measure a house's internet every five minutes and tell you when it degrades or dies, with no case, no adapter and a battery that rides out power blips. A tested probe script with Uptime Kuma push and ntfy, the measured…

Hosting a Public Website on an ESP32: What Breaks, Measured, and the Front That Fixes It

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/hosting-a-public-website-on-an-esp32

Published: November 1, 2026 00:00

A $10 ESP32 can serve a real website, and its limits teach how to treat any weak origin. We ran ESP-IDF 6.1 firmware under Espressif's QEMU and measured the 7-socket lockout, 26 KB of heap per TLS session, the flash-read path that collapses under load, and…

Salvaged GPUs in 2026: Which Old Cards Still Earn a Slot (and the Driver Cliff That Decides It)

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/salvaged-gpus-2026-which-still-earn-a-slot

Published: November 1, 2026 00:00

GTX 1070/1080, Quadro P400/P1000 and RX 480/580 are the free GPUs of 2026. The deciding factor isn't speed, it's software: NVIDIA's 580 branch is the last for Pascal, Debian 13 ships 550, NVIDIA's own Debian 13 repo starts at 590, and Ollama wants 570 or…

USB OTG Storage for Phone Servers: Power Budgets, UAS, and Which Filesystem Survives a Brownout

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/usb-otg-storage-for-phone-servers

Published: November 1, 2026 00:00

Phone servers run out of trustworthy storage fast, and USB OTG done right is the fix. The current budget that makes bus-powered SSDs brown out, why powered PD-passthrough hubs are the pattern, what Android will and won't mount, and a 12-cut power-loss test…

Scavenging PSUs and Laptop Bricks: A Safe-Reuse Cheatsheet for the Homelab

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/scavenging-psus-and-laptop-bricks-safe-reuse

Published: November 1, 2026 00:00

Laptop power bricks and old ATX supplies are the most reusable e-waste in the drawer, and the most dangerous to reuse blindly. 19 V bricks via buck converters, USB-PD trigger boards and why 12 V is the unreliable one, the ATX power-on short, load and…

Moving Day for Your Network: A Teardown and Rebuild Playbook

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/moving-day-network-teardown-rebuild-playbook

Published: October 31, 2026 00:00

Moving apartments without a week of broken internet: the network teardown and rebuild as a runbook rather than a scramble. Config exports from OPNsense, OpenWrt and UniFi before anything is unplugged; a photo pass, a port map, and a printed sheet of…

Windows 11 VM on Proxmox: VirtIO, TPM and Activation

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/windows-11-vm-on-proxmox-virtio-tpm-and-activation

Published: October 31, 2026 00:00

Windows 11 as a Proxmox guest fails in the same few places every time: Setup can't see the disk, the installer refuses the hardware, OOBE has no network, and activation is a mystery afterwards. The working VM shape (q35, OVMF with pre-enrolled keys, TPM…

Building-Provided Internet and Managed Wi-Fi: What You Can Do

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/building-provided-internet-managed-wifi-what-you-can-do

Published: October 31, 2026 00:00

Your rent includes internet and a landlord-managed Wi-Fi network you can't configure. How to carve out a network you control anyway: your own router behind theirs, on the unit's Ethernet jack or using their Wi-Fi as its uplink; living with double NAT; why…

Hosting a Homelab on Starlink: CGNAT, IPv6 and Bypass Mode

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/starlink-homelab-hosting-cgnat-ipv6-and-bypass-mode

Published: October 31, 2026 00:00

Starlink puts residential IPv4 behind carrier-grade NAT with no inbound connections, but hands every terminal a publicly routed IPv6 /56 that most people never use. How to put your own router in front (bypass mode, or simply plugging in), serve inbound…

Backing Up Windows PCs to a Linux NAS: The Agents Compared

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/backing-up-windows-pcs-to-a-linux-nas-agents-compared

Published: October 31, 2026 00:00

Getting the family's Windows machines backed up to a Linux or ZFS NAS comes down to the agent on each PC. UrBackup, Veeam Agent Free, Kopia, restic and Duplicati compared on what actually matters: bare-metal restore, shadow-copy correctness, unattended…

File Formats That Will Still Open in 2050

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/file-formats-that-will-still-open-in-2050

Published: October 29, 2026 00:00

Which formats should you archive photos, audio, video, documents and data in so they still open decades from now? Measured: reference files encoded into 34 candidate formats and decoded with every independent tool on a stock Debian 13 system, checked…

Bulk-Scanning Photo Prints: FastFoto vs Flatbed vs Phone Apps

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/bulk-scanning-photo-prints-fastfoto-vs-flatbed-vs-phone-apps

Published: October 29, 2026 00:00

How to digitise a shoebox, or ten, of family photo prints: a feeder scanner like the Epson FastFoto, a flatbed with several prints per pass, or a phone app. What resolution prints actually need according to the federal digitisation guidelines, the storage…

Buy Drives Now or Wait Out the 2026 Surge?

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/buy-drives-now-or-wait-out-the-2026-surge

Published: October 29, 2026 00:00

Hard drive prices have risen 2.4 to 4.1 times since late 2025. Should you buy now or wait? Measured Amazon price histories for six popular drives, what the 2011 Thailand floods and the 2021 Chia spike say about how long shocks last, why this one is…

M-DISC Archival Claims vs Reality: The 2026 Verdict

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/m-disc-archival-claims-vs-reality-the-2026-verdict

Published: October 29, 2026 00:00

M-DISC is sold as the optical disc that lasts a thousand years. What does the evidence actually say in 2026? The two accelerated-aging tests everyone cites, read from the source documents, and why they disagree; what Verbatim itself now claims for M-DISC…

ServerPartDeals vs goHardDrive vs eBay: Recertified Drives Compared

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/serverpartdeals-vs-goharddrive-vs-ebay-recertified-drives

Published: October 29, 2026 00:00

The three main places to buy used and recertified enterprise hard drives, compared on the same drive on the same day: a Seagate Exos X20 18 TB at ServerPartDeals, goHardDrive and eBay, with every seller's written warranty, return and testing terms side by…

A Renter's Closet Homelab: Heat, Noise and Power Limits

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/renter-closet-homelab-heat-noise-power-limits

Published: October 29, 2026 00:00

How much homelab fits in a closet you're not allowed to modify? A heat budget for a closed closet from standard building-physics values, plus a tested script that measures your own closet's watts-per-degree from a temperature sensor and a smart plug; real…

Which 2026 Externals Still Shuck Well

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/which-2026-externals-still-shuck-well

Published: October 29, 2026 00:00

Is shucking still worth it in late 2026? A dated price snapshot of WD Elements, My Book and Seagate Expansion externals against bare internal drives and recertified enterprise drives at every capacity from 8 TB to 28 TB, what the manufacturers do and don't…

How Old Is Too Old for a Used Enterprise Drive?

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/how-old-is-too-old-for-a-used-enterprise-drive

Published: October 29, 2026 00:00

Used enterprise hard drives are sold with 30,000 to 60,000 power-on hours. Is that too many? I computed failure rates by power-on hours from a full year of Backblaze's raw drive data, 334,000 drive-years and 4,751 failures, overall and within individual…

View Your Cameras Remotely Without Cloud or Port Forwarding

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/view-cameras-remotely-without-cloud-or-port-forwarding

Published: October 29, 2026 00:00

How to watch your home cameras from your phone with no camera-maker cloud account and no ports opened to the internet. WireGuard or Tailscale straight to the NVR, with config for both; measured data use per hour for main streams and sub-streams in H.264…

Kokoro ONNX vs PyTorch: Same Voice, Different Speed, Measured

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/kokoro-onnx-vs-pytorch-same-voice-different-speed-measured

Published: October 27, 2026 00:00

The ONNX build of the Kokoro text-to-speech model speaks noticeably faster than the PyTorch original at the same speed setting. Both runtimes measured side by side on one CPU box: audio duration, the speed value that matches, real-time factor, memory, the…

A VPN Kill Switch for One Container: The gluetun Pattern

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/vpn-kill-switch-for-one-container-the-gluetun-pattern

Published: October 27, 2026 00:00

Route exactly one app, typically a torrent client, through a VPN with a real kill switch while everything else on the host stays on the LAN. gluetun with network_mode service, tested end to end: traffic and DNS inside the tunnel, a tunnel that drops…

Incus with OpenTofu: The Terraform Provider Pattern

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/incus-with-opentofu-the-terraform-provider-pattern

Published: October 27, 2026 00:00

Declare Incus storage pools, networks, profiles and instances as code with OpenTofu and the lxc/incus provider, then plan, diff and rebuild instead of clicking. Tested end to end: apply and replace times, drift detection, cloud-init through profiles and…

autobrr: From IRC Announce to Injected Torrent

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/autobrr-from-irc-announce-to-injected-torrent

Published: October 27, 2026 00:00

autobrr watches a tracker's IRC announce channel, matches each new release against your filters and pushes the torrent straight into your client. Built and measured against a local fake tracker: custom indexer definitions, the filter fields and the…

Gemma 4 on a CPU-Only Box, Measured

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/gemma-4-on-a-cpu-only-box-measured

Published: October 27, 2026 00:00

Google's Gemma 4 small models on a homelab box with no GPU, through Ollama: memory, load time, prompt and generation speed, a known-answer quiz, tool calls and a vision check, measured on six cores of a Ryzen 5 5600 with 10 GB of RAM, against Qwen3 and…

Cataloguing Offline Media So You Can Find Files in 2040

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/cataloging-offline-media-so-you-can-find-files-in-2040

Published: October 27, 2026 00:00

Which shelf drive, tape or disc holds the file you need, twenty years from now? A tested catalogue pattern: a media ID on the case, the medium and its filesystem; a plain-text listing per medium as the source of truth; plocate and SQLite as rebuildable…

Ollama's Prompt Cache Fakes Your Benchmark's Prefill Speed

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/ollama-prompt-cache-fakes-benchmark-prefill-speed

Published: October 27, 2026 00:00

Run the same prompt through Ollama twice and the second run reports thousands of prompt tokens processed in a few hundredths of a second. Measured on a CPU-only box: identical prompts inflated prompt-processing speed 390 to 420 times, a shared prefix 55 to…

Detecting Deletions Early: changedetection.io, Sitemap Diffing and Catalog Polling

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/detecting-deletions-early-changedetection-io-and-sitemap-diffing

Published: October 27, 2026 00:00

You cannot rescue what you did not notice was dying. Build a deletion early-warning system: changedetection.io watching announcement pages for shutdown language, sitemap.xml and robots.txt diffing as the cheap canary for mass removals, polling data.gov and…

Proxmox Backup Server to Tape: LTO Media Pools, Catalogs and the Restore Drill

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/pbs-tape-backup-lto-media-pools-and-restores

Published: October 27, 2026 00:00

Proxmox Backup Server writes to LTO tape natively. A tested walkthrough on PBS 4.2 with an emulated tape library: getting the changer and drives detected, media pools with allocation and retention, barcode labelling, tape backup jobs that skip what's…

Storage Layout for Media Archives: yt-dlp Output Templates That Scale

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/storage-layout-for-media-archives-output-templates-that-scale

Published: October 26, 2026 00:00

How should you name and lay out a yt-dlp archive so it still works at 10,000 videos? A tested config pattern: the video ID in every filename, folders keyed by channel ID, date formats Jellyfin and Plex actually parse, byte-safe truncation that keeps the…

Where to Run Your Media Archiver: Home IP vs VPS vs Seedbox

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/where-to-run-your-media-archiver-home-ip-vs-vps-vs-seedbox

Published: October 26, 2026 00:00

Should yt-dlp run on your home server, a VPS, or a seedbox? The box you download from now matters more than any flag, because platforms judge requests by IP class. A decision guide with a per-platform matrix measured from a residential connection, what…

Mirror a YouTube Channel Before It Disappears: The Complete Rescue Run

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/mirror-a-youtube-channel-before-it-disappears

Published: October 26, 2026 00:00

A channel has announced its deletion, or is about to be terminated, and you have days. How do you get all of it, not just the videos tab? A tested walkthrough: enumerate everything first, rank a worklist, capture videos with full metadata, subtitles and…

iCloud Photos to Immich: The icloudpd Migration Pipeline

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/icloud-photos-to-immich-the-icloudpd-migration-pipeline

Published: October 25, 2026 00:00

How to get a family's photos out of iCloud and into Immich without a week at a Mac: icloudpd for the bulk download and an ongoing one-way sync, the two-month re-authentication that breaks unattended runs, how Immich pairs Live Photos (tested on Immich…

yt-dlp Throttling Survival: Rate Limits, 429s, and IP Blocks

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/yt-dlp-throttling-survival-rate-limits-429s-and-ip-blocks

Published: October 25, 2026 00:00

How fast can you pull from YouTube with yt-dlp before it throttles, rate-limits, or blocks you outright? A playbook for the sleep and retry values that survive multi-day channel runs, telling a soft throttle from a real block from an extractor break, and…

Mealie With a Local LLM: Recipe Import and Ingredient Parsing, Measured

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/mealie-with-a-local-llm-recipe-and-ingredient-parsing-measured

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

Mealie 3.29 can use any OpenAI-compatible model to parse ingredient lines, import recipes from pasted text, and read recipes from photos. This guide connects it to local models (a 27B on a LAN GPU, an 8B and a 4B vision model on a 4-core CPU) and measures…

Bonsai 27B at 1 Bit on a CPU: Does a 27B Model in 3.8 GB Beat a Small One?

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/bonsai-27b-1-bit-on-a-cpu-does-a-27b-in-4gb-beat-a-small-model

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

PrismML's Bonsai 27B squeezes Qwen3.6-27B into a 3.8 GB 1-bit file that is meant to run on an 8 GB GPU. This guide runs it where many homelabs actually are, on a 6-core Ryzen with no GPU, against Qwen3 4B and 8B at Q4 on a 40-question homelab task set with…

Prompt-Lookup Decoding on a CPU, Measured: Three Times Faster Edits for Free

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/prompt-lookup-decoding-on-a-cpu-measured-for-code-edits

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

When a model rewrites a file with a small change, most of what it generates is already in the prompt. llama.cpp's n-gram speculative decoding (prompt lookup) guesses those tokens from the prompt and verifies several at once, with no draft model. On a…

Alt Text for a Static Blog With a Local Vision Model, Audited

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/alt-text-for-a-static-blog-with-a-local-vision-model-audited

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

A 4B vision model on a CPU drafts usable alt text for screenshots, charts and photos in about 13 seconds an image. The hard part is checking it. This guide builds a draft-and-check pipeline (llama-server with Qwen3-VL-4B, a prompt that asks for one short…

An Automatic Cryptominer Alarm: Pool DNS, Stratum Traffic and Idle-Host CPU, Tested

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/an-automatic-cryptominer-alarm-pool-dns-and-cpu-baselines

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

Most compromises of internet-facing homelab services end the same way: a miner that uses every core. This guide builds a small standard-library watcher that alerts on the three things a miner cannot easily hide (looking up a pool, speaking the stratum…

Pi Coding Agent With a Local Model: What Four Tools Get Done, Measured

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/pi-coding-agent-with-a-local-model-what-four-tools-get-done

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

Pi is a deliberately small terminal coding agent: four tools (read, write, edit, bash), a short system prompt and no permission prompts. This guide runs Pi 1.4 in a throwaway container against local models on seven homelab chores with automatic pass/fail…

Can a Local LLM Detect LLM-Written Posts? Measured on 180 Forum Comments

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/can-a-local-llm-detect-llm-written-posts-measured

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

Moderators of small forums and fediverse instances increasingly want to spot machine-written posts, and asking a local model 'was this written by an AI?' is the obvious tool. This guide measures it on two test sets of 120 comments: the same 60 human…

A Local LLM Pull Request Reviewer for Forgejo, Measured on Seeded Bugs

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/a-local-llm-pull-request-reviewer-for-forgejo-measured

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

A 150-line webhook bot that reads every new pull request on a Forgejo instance, asks a local model for a correctness and security review, and posts the answer as a PR review. Measured on twelve pull requests, eight with one seeded bug each and four clean:…

Dawarich: Importing Google Timeline Exports, Tested Format by Format

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/dawarich-importing-google-timeline-exports-tested

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

Google's location history now comes in four shapes depending on when and where you exported it: Takeout's Records.json, Takeout's monthly Semantic Location History, the Android on-device Timeline.json and the iOS location-history.json. This guide writes…

Local Model Tool Calling, Measured: 20 Homelab Requests, 40 Tools and Two-Step Tasks

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/local-model-tool-calling-accuracy-measured

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

Before wiring a local model to Home Assistant, Docker or DNS through tools, it helps to know how often it calls the right tool with the right arguments. This guide measures it through llama-server's and an Ollama-based gateway's OpenAI-compatible tool…

Tiny-Active MoE Models on a CPU-Only Box, Measured: gpt-oss-20b and LFM2.5-24B-A2B Against Dense 4B and 8B

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/tiny-active-moe-models-on-a-cpu-only-box-measured

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

Mixture-of-experts models with only 2 to 4 billion active parameters run at small-model speed while holding a much larger model's knowledge, which suits CPU-only homelab machines with RAM to spare. On a 6-core Ryzen with no GPU, gpt-oss-20b answered all 40…

Auditing CT Logs After a CA Incident: Who Has Issued Certificates for Your Domains

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/auditing-ct-logs-after-a-ca-incident-who-issued-for-your-domains

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

When a certificate authority is compromised, as eMudhra's eight intermediates were in October 2026, the question for a site owner is short: has anyone issued a certificate for my domains that I did not ask for? This guide answers it with Certificate…

Pocket ID Backup, Restore and Lost-Passkey Recovery, Tested

https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/pocket-id-backup-restore-and-lost-passkey-recovery-tested

Published: October 24, 2026 00:00

Pocket ID holds every login in a homelab that uses it, and its users have nothing but passkeys. This guide tests what a backup has to contain and what goes wrong on restore, with a software passkey that logs in before and after each step: a hot copy of…