Tech

Update (2026-07-23): refreshed this post with the latest containers and recent experiments.

I’ve really missed having a homelab over the past few years. I vaguely remember a PC I assembled in the early 2000s with a dual Pentium II, ECC RAM, and Debian GNU/Linux. It served as a firewall, DNS, DHCP server, mail server (back when spam wasn’t yet a massive problem), and file server.

Proxmox VE Dashboard

For a long time, I got by with a minimal home setup—just a MacBook and a router. But eventually, you realize you need more: a NAS for proper data control (the cloud isn’t a universal solution), a UPS to keep your storage safe from power fluctuations, and an ever-growing collection of IoT devices.

I’ve used to prefer an assembled PC with old hardware in place of typical hardware routers and gateways. After years with a Debian PC used as router/fileserver/etc I’ve wanted a silent little machine to do the same things. The ASUS WL-500 was the response, after a week or so I’ve changed the firmware with x-wrt that is OpenWRT with a much better GUI and some patches.

Surfing the net

No problem at all, I’ve wireless and wired clients. I use WPA for the wireless connection in the advanced setting I’ve found that Since OpenWRT RC6 you have to set wl0_txpwr in qdBm (1/4 dBm), so if you want to achieve 20 dBm, you have to set wl0_txpwr to 80.

Advanced Mac OS X Programming is an important and unique book, because most Mac programming books focus mainly on frameworks like Cocoa or Carbon (for example the essential Cocoa: Programming for OS X written by one of the authors). This book instead covers everything that would usually be found in a BSD programming book, with the Mac OS X specifics added on top: its proprietary filesystem and a number of low-level APIs.