The Journey
Notes from the transition — infrastructure, learning, and building in public.
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Three Designs, a Domain Cutover, and the Media Stack Comes Home
The portfolio redesign shipped to n5hq.me after three full rebuilds — then the bigger job: pulling the whole media automation stack off the rented seedbox and onto the home server, with the 22TB of storage staying put and the file moves still happening at the source.
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Storage Fixes, Vault Cleanup, and the Reboot That Bit Back
Renamed the external drive mount, set up Samba shares, fixed the T7 Shield's UAS instability — then the reboot that fix required quietly took down Home Assistant and the website dev server. Recovery story included.
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Network Fixes, Tailscale, and a NIC Upgrade
Diagnosed the Aqara doorbell and Canon printer issues via UniFi MCP, got Tailscale running across all devices, installed Claude CLI on the MacBook, and swapped the server NIC to 2.5GbE.
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Automating the Blog & Cleaning Up the Portfolio
Wired up GitHub Actions to auto-publish blog posts, stripped placeholder content, and cleaned up the portfolio tiles to show only what's real.
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Building Momentum: Homelab Services + Website Launch
Deployed the monitoring stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki), made Immich publicly accessible, and completed the N5HQ website with portfolio and contact sections.
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Home Assistant Goes Public
Got Home Assistant accessible remotely via Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnel — after about 1.5 hours of chasing a silent 502.