https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/ Homelab war stories, build logs and debugging tales from a self-hosted lab. en https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/four-systems.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/four-systems.html Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:00:00 +0200 I gave an AI agent permission to restart exactly one service without asking me. Getting there took four systems: a deterministic engine with no AI in it, an agent that watches, a HUD that can veto it, and a folder of markdown as memory — plus the breaker nobody builds, for a fix that succeeds forever while the thing stays broken. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/it-was-the-isp.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/it-was-the-isp.html Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0200 The internet vanished from my apartment with everything on my side healthy. A WAN capture showed my DHCP requests leaving and nothing answering — while the ISP's gateway was alive on the wire and a neighbour was failing too. The proof it was upstream: a static-IP bypass the access network refused by design. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/the-dishwasher-that-wouldnt-move.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/the-dishwasher-that-wouldnt-move.html Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:30:00 +0200 Moving a Siemens dishwasher onto an IoT VLAN meant fighting Home Connect's "at home" gate — which needs your phone on the appliance's current network, the exact thing VLAN isolation removes. Plus a band change, a static-IP prompt, and an IPv6 toggle that all didn't matter. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/the-outage-that-wasnt.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/the-outage-that-wasnt.html Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:00:00 +0200 Testing DNS failover, my checks reported total failure and I nearly took the house down chasing it — until dig and netstat showed everything was fine. BusyBox's pgrep and nslookup had lied in unison. The failover worked; strict-order was the one real bug. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/bricked-by-a-cdn.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/bricked-by-a-cdn.html Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0200 A routine Home Assistant point update left the whole apartment stuck NOT_RUNNING — because at boot, a core version change re-fetches its Python wheels from a CDN that was returning 522, and rollback needs the same dead server. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/connected-and-dead.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/connected-and-dead.html Sun, 12 Jul 2026 11:30:00 +0200 Full signal bars and 100% packet loss: a living-room TV wedged into a WiFi zombie state after a DFS radar eviction on channel 100. A one-line deauth revives it; moving off DFS to channel 44 ends it for good. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/everyone-looks-local.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/everyone-looks-local.html Sat, 11 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0200 My friends' Jellyfin streams kept buffering and the remote bitrate cap did nothing — because behind a reverse proxy, every client looks local until you teach the app to trust the proxy and read the forwarded address. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/half-a-terabyte-of-deja-vu.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/half-a-terabyte-of-deja-vu.html Sat, 11 Jul 2026 11:30:00 +0200 My media pool was filling up with nothing new — every film existed twice, seeding and imported. Hardlinks can't cross a filesystem boundary, and I'd drawn one straight between downloads and media. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/wifi-ghost.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/wifi-ghost.html Sat, 14 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0200 Chasing a flaky WiFi-roaming bug across two OpenWRT access points — an amnesiac daemon, a phantom radio, a port poltergeist, and the watchdog that fixed it. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/cat-vs-automations.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/cat-vs-automations.html Sun, 14 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0200 Designing a smart home around a cat named Pixel — and why every scene in my apartment is a manual button. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/homelab-fixes-itself.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/homelab-fixes-itself.html Sun, 14 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0200 Building an autonomous operations brain for a homelab — events, a knowledge graph, guarded workflows, and a junior SRE that never sleeps. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/no-docker-on-purpose.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/no-docker-on-purpose.html Sun, 14 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0200 Running ~24 homelab services as native systemd in unprivileged LXC — no containers in sight, and why it's been worth it. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/photo-memories.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/photo-memories.html Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0200 Building a private photo-memories loop: phone to self-hosted cloud to the living-room TV — without the screenshots tagging along. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/calendar-saga.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/calendar-saga.html Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0200 A multi-hour fight to get a Google-style month calendar with spanning event bars into Home Assistant — and the one CSS line that won it. https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/e1000e-nic-hang.html https://www.michaelz.dev/blog/e1000e-nic-hang.html Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0200 A backup node that kept vanishing from the network, an Intel driver bug, and a three-word fix.