How I repurposed an old gaming laptop into an always-on Ubuntu Server running Immich, Docker, GPU acceleration and private remote access through Tailscale
Homelab
Browsing tag
homelab
7 results across the site.
Blog posts
Homelab
Setting up a DNS sinkhole (Pi-hole) on home server
Homelab
Isolating Windows server to protect the LAN
Site Building
Converted Labs from a static list into dynamic, blog-style write-ups
Homelab
Designing a repeatable SSH security lab with KVM, linked clones, and minimal storage overhead
Homelab
What I’m using to learn: a small Ubuntu server, monitoring, and a plan for future labs
Projects
Self-Hosted n8n cybersecurity daily digest
activeCyberSignal is a self-hosted n8n automation that collects cybersecurity news, vulnerability updates, threat research, and security technology stories each morning, ranks them by relevance, removes repeated stories, and posts a concise daily digest into Discord. I built it to solve a real student workflow problem: staying current with cybersecurity news without spending hours reading every article. The automation helps me quickly skim important stories, identify topics worth deeper research, and keep up with threat activity relevant to my homelab and learning goals.
Lessons: This project taught me how important workflow design is in automation. Early versions sent duplicate Discord messages because parallel RSS branches triggered downstream nodes separately, so I redesigned the workflow to merge sources before normalization and delivery.
I also learned that persistent memory matters for useful daily automation. A digest that repeats the same links quickly becomes noise, so I added file-backed seen-item memory to filter old stories and surface the next best unseen items.
The biggest lesson was balancing reliability with usefulness: native n8n RSS/HTTP nodes were more reliable than custom fetch logic, while custom Code nodes were better for normalization, scoring, formatting, and memory.