Articles, Notes, & Insights
A collection of technical write-ups, lessons learned, and ideas explored through hands-on experience.
Sometimes the Hardest Part Is Stepping Back
I set out to build an agentic AI system capable of automating red team operations end-to-end. Reconnaissance, vulnerability discovery, exploitation, reporting—the full offensive lifecycle. The longer-term vision extended even further: feed those results into a blue team AI that could prioritize risk, generate remediations, validate fixes, and quantify risk reduction automatically. From a technical standpoint,…
From “It Works” to “It Thinks”: Building a Real Agentic AI System at Home
Or: why context windows, KV cache, and humility matter more than bigger models. My last blog post ended on a high note: I had a functional, fully local LLM stack running in my homelab. Models were answering questions, Open-WebUI was humming along, and Ollama had made the early experimentation delightfully easy. Then I tried to…
AI Adventures – Part Two – Agents and Architecture
When you’re trying to turn your homelab into SkyNet, it helps to start with a blueprint. So before we dive into the debugging hijinks, existential model crises, and browser-induced gaslighting that dominated this chapter, let’s start with the real architecture I built, the one that turned my homelab into a fully offline, containerized AI city‑state,…
When Your LLM Adventure Goes Sideways (and Why That’s Okay)
There’s a saying in engineering that “everything works perfectly—right up until you actually try it.” This blog post is about one of those journeys. A technical adventure where I set out with a bold vision, built a lot of infrastructure, wrestled with more containers than a shipping port, and ultimately arrived at one undeniable conclusion:…
Setting Manual Fan Speeds on Dual RTX 3090 GPUs
A Tale of Fans, Frustration, and Finally Figuring It Out Introduction What began as a simple mission—“Make the fans go brrrr”—quickly transformed into an unexpected deep dive into the mysterious inner workings of nvidia-settings on a headless Linux box. As any good homelab tinkerer knows, nothing is ever truly simple, especially when GPUs are involved….
When Libvirt NAT Goes Rogue: A Tale of Fedora, Firewalls, and Virtual Mayhem
Like any sensible cybersecurity professional with entirely normal hobbies, I occasionally spin up a small digital nation-state of VMs on my Fedora desktop. Usually they behave. Usually. Then one day, without warning, they staged a coordinated rebellion. This post chronicles how my Fedora workstation decided to reinvent network segmentation, how libvirt lost its memory of…
Automatic Blog‑Post Pipeline: Git + GitLab + n8n + WordPress
Why bother? Markdown is much easier and faster to work with than building HTML, or WordPress blocks, so my personal theory is that I might actually post more if I make it easier for myself. Also it is an excuse to play with automation and AI. Do we need more of a reason then that?…
Taking my privacy back: Part 1 – Migrating from Windows to Linux
It wasn’t just one thing that prompted me to switch it was a number of factors. Microsoft’s latest feature “Recall” just happened to be the straw that broke the camels back here. Though it is a heavy piece of straw in and of itself. Like a lot of people I was getting tired of the…
Migrating from VMware to ProxMox
This is a longer post so here is a Table of Contents Migration Attempt #Two So this is my second attempt to migrate away from VMware’s platform. This one went better then last time, though there were some causalities along the way. Namely all my Windows VMs. The reason for the migration has not changed,…
My failed migration of my Homelab from VMware to XCP-NG with XO
The Backstory It is coming up on time to renew my VMug advantage, but with VMware dropping support for a lot of older hardware, plus Broadcom’s statement about not really caring about any one but their 5 biggest customers. I figure I should migrate to a more open source solution, plus my wallet will feel…
Practicing Least Privileged Usage on Windows at Home
So I rebuilt my computer about 4 months ago and I run Windows 10 for my primary desktop. When I did that I decided to also implement some security best practices. Namely not always running as an account with admin permissions. Here is my summary of that experience. Configuration and Setup Immediately after rebuilding I…
Configuring NGINX with HTTPS redirect and reverse proxying to multiple services
So I had an issue where I wanted to host multiple websites behind a single web address/IP address. I knew this was possible to do, but I didn’t know how. I also wanted it to be secured by HTTPS, which would require a redirect of all HTTP traffic. I stitched together the following. I commented…
Recovering Bitlocker recovery key when you have the password
What we are actually doing This is a guide that walks you though decrypting a Bitlocker encrypted drive when you need to perform startup repair and don’t have the recovery key. What you need Background info So I had a problem this morning, my computer ran updates last night and some Windows startup files got…
Extending a linux LVM partition after expanding its virtual hard drive using parted
This assumes you already have expanded the hard drive within VMware or VirtualBox, or whatever your virtualization solution you use. You will also need to make sure parted is installed on the system you are working on. This guide is using GNU parted 3.1 Disclaimer: Parted is a partition modification tool make sure you have…
Reformatting NetApp Disks from 520 sector size to 512 sector size using FreeNAS (FreeBSD)
So I have some disks I got from a friend, he got them off ebay and they didn’t work for him, he couldn’t get his RAID controller to format them at all. After doing some research I came to the conclusion he didn’t have the equipment needed to reformat them. I offered to buy them…
Creating Custom ESXi Image
So my whitebox ESXi server doesn’t have drivers for ESXi out of the box the following is how I created a custom image with the necessary drivers. Requirements Procedure Create a folder to work in, in that folder create a folder labeled “Offline” Get the ESXi 6.7 Offline depot files and put them in the…
Automated backup of MySQL databases to Google Drive
So I had a hard drive crash due to a power outage. The disk was partly functional and I was able to pull most of the .ibd files and spent 15 hours rebuilding the database table by table. I recovered most of what I needed but not having an automated backup really bit me in…
CentOS 7 Services (systemd) and Minecraft Servers
So last night I finally got around to configuring my minecraft servers to start with the OS. The server hosting my minecraft servers is running CentOS 7. I run CentOS because Red Hat 9 was my first linux OS and I have since preferred RPM based systems over DEB based. Also CentOS is closer to…
Building an ESXi White Box
This is the story of my migration from expensive to run server rack equipment, to a cheap both in build and to run, VMware ESXi white box. Let’s start with a quick run-down of my equipment to date. First off, this was all free. So as you can imagine, the specs aren’t great but that…