Tutorials
Step-by-step technical walkthroughs for networking, Linux, homelab, security, storage, media servers, and practical troubleshooting.
Small Office Monitoring: The 12 Checks That Catch Real Outages
A small-office monitoring guide covering WAN, DNS, DHCP, router health, captive portals, APs, PoE, UPS, local services, backups, and alerting.
Captive Portal Triage: Connected, No Login Page, No Internet
Find the first failed captive-portal layer, from association and addressing through discovery, authentication, access policy and upstream routing. Compare clients and preserve logs before changing settings; discovery and NAT behavior depend on the design.
PisoWiFi Daily Operator Checklist
A PisoWiFi daily operations checklist for checking power, ISP, Wi-Fi, DHCP, DNS, captive portal login, vouchers, sessions, and daily logs.
Smart Home Device Inventory: The Spreadsheet That Saves Your Future Self
Map smart-home devices to controllers, entities, power sources and dependent automations. Store setup-code references rather than secrets in the inventory, and keep a protected copy available when the controller is down.
UniFi Route Troubleshooting: Routing Tables, Forwarding State, and Packet Paths
Trace a UniFi client flow through routing policy, forwarding state, observed egress and replies. Compare failure and recovery behavior without treating a routing-table entry as packet-path proof.
Thread Troubleshooting: Border Routers, Split Networks, and the New Thread Tools App
A Thread troubleshooting guide for smart homes, covering border routers, split networks, Matter controllers, Home Assistant, Thread Tools, and IPv6.
Home Assistant Update Plan: How to Upgrade Without Breaking the House
A Home Assistant maintenance guide for reading release notes, backing up, updating Core/OS/add-ons safely, smoke testing automations, and rolling back.
Patching Is Not Eradication: When An Edge Appliance Must Be Rebuilt
Decide whether supported remediation can restore trust in a compromised edge appliance. Coordinate containment, evidence preservation, configuration review and credential changes before rebuilding or reconnecting it.
Wi-Fi 7 MLO Reality Check: Client Type, WPA3, And IoT Breakage
Evaluate Wi-Fi 7 MLO by client radio mode, security settings and actual application behavior. Plan separate throughput, roaming and reconnect checks while preserving compatible, restricted access for legacy IoT devices.
When The Firewall Is Compromised, What Else Must Be Rotated?
Map firewall sessions, tokens, VPN secrets, certificates and connected identity services after compromise. Rotate affected trust in dependency order while separating confirmed exposure from systems that were merely reachable.