Author

Smarc

Founder and editor of vo.rs. A lifelong tinkerer who self-hosts far more than is sensible, hardens Linux boxes for fun, and prods the latest AI tools to see what they can really do. The how-to guides here are the notes Smarc wishes had existed the first time round.

Founder and editor of vo.rs, and the byline behind most of the technology writing here. Smarc is a lifelong tinkerer who self-hosts far more than is sensible, enjoys hardening Linux servers for the sport of it, and spends a suspicious amount of time prodding new AI tools to find out what they can genuinely do. The guides on vo.rs are written to be the clear, tested, jargon-light notes Smarc wishes had existed the first time round.

SBOM: Software Bill of Materials and Why You Should Care About Your Dependencies2025-11-21

DNS Sinkholing: Blocking Malware Domains at the Network Level2025-11-09

Sigstore and Cosign: Verifying Container Images Before They Run2025-10-17

Linux Audit Framework: Tracking Who Did What on Your Servers2025-10-03

YubiKey for Everything: SSH, GPG, FIDO2, and the Paperweight Drawer2025-09-22

Kubernetes Resource Requests and Limits: The Difference Between Crashing and Thriving2025-09-08

Distroless Container Images: Smaller, Safer, and More Annoying to Debug2025-08-21

ArgoCD: GitOps with a Dashboard You Might Actually Use2025-08-11

Container Networking Debugging: tcpdump, nsenter, and What Packets Are Actually Doing2025-07-17

Dagger: CI/CD Pipelines as Code That Run Anywhere2025-07-07

Semantic Search on Your Own Documents: Embeddings, Vector DBs, and Practical Limits2025-06-28

Running Gemma 3 Locally: Google's Small Model on Consumer Hardware2025-06-25

Voice Assistants Without the Cloud: Whisper, Piper, and Home Assistant2025-06-22

AI-Powered Git Commit Messages: Useful or Just Annoying2025-06-14

Open WebUI Pipelines: Chaining Local Models with Tools and RAG2025-06-05

Stable Diffusion Workflows: Turning ComfyUI into an Image API2025-06-02

Rebooting Legacy Systems: Modernising COBOL Without Breaking Compliance2025-05-30

Building Psychological Safety in DevOps: Lessons from Flight Decks and Firefighting2025-05-26

AI-Driven Incident Response: Can Machine Learning Beat Human Intuition?2025-05-22

Beyond VPNs: Leveraging Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) for Remote Workforces2025-05-17

Dirty Pipe, Copy Fail, Dirty Frag: What Linux Kernel Exploits Keep Teaching Us2025-05-13

From Logs to Insights: Building a Real-Time SIEM Pipeline with Open-Source Tools2025-05-12

Digital Sovereignty in the EU: Navigating Schrems II, GDPR, and Local Hosting Mandates2025-05-08

Automated Chaos: Using Fault Injection to Build Resilience Before Your Users Notice2025-04-28

Edge Computing vs. Cloud: Choosing the Right Architecture for Mission-Critical IoT2025-04-18

Beszel: Lightweight Server Monitoring Without the Grafana Overhead2025-04-08

Cybersecurity by Design: Embedding Zero-Trust into Your Product Roadmap2025-04-07

Why Your Kubernetes Cluster Crashes at 2 a.m. and How to Stop It2025-04-02

Quantum-Safe Cryptography Explained: Future-Proofing Your Organisation's Data2025-03-27

The Hidden Compliance Risks in Generative AI—and How to Mitigate Them2025-03-21

Self-Hosted AI Search: Replacing Google with Perplexica and a Local Model2025-03-19

Stalwart: Self-Hosting Your Own Email Server (and Why You Probably Shouldn't)2025-03-04

From Zero to SSH Hero: Securely Hardening a Linux Server in 20252025-03-03

MCP Servers: Giving Language Models Hands and Eyes2025-02-18

IPv6 at Home: Why It Matters Now and How to Stop Ignoring It2025-02-11

Building in Public: What Running a Blog on Your Own Infrastructure Teaches You2025-02-05

Wazuh: A Self-Hosted SIEM for the Home Lab (Is It Worth the RAM?)2025-01-28

Tandoor: When Your Recipe Collection Outgrows Browser Bookmarks2025-01-15

Running AI Inference on Kubernetes: GPU Scheduling, Ollama, and Resource Sharing2025-01-09

Kubernetes Secrets Management: SOPS, Sealed Secrets, or External Secrets2024-12-19

The SaaS Trap: How Per-Seat Pricing Pushes You Toward Self-Hosting2024-12-03

Linkwarden: Self-Hosted Bookmarking for the Tab Hoarder2024-11-26

Kaniko: Building Container Images Inside Kubernetes2024-11-21

Proxmox vs Kubernetes for the Home Lab: Pick the Right Tool for the Mess2024-11-19

Supply Chain Attacks: From npm Typosquatting to Poisoned Container Images2024-11-12

Keel: Automated Kubernetes Deployments Without GitOps Overhead2024-10-24

Proton vs Tuta vs Self-Hosted: Email Privacy, Practically Assessed2024-10-22

Let's Encrypt Rate Limits: What to Do When You Hit the Wall2024-10-09

Calico vs Cilium: Kubernetes CNI for a Home Cluster2024-10-08

Local LLMs: A Practical Comparison of Llama, Mistral, and Gemma for Real Work2024-09-24

Authelia vs Authentik: Choosing a Self-Hosted SSO You Won't Regret2024-09-18

eBPF: The Linux Kernel Feature That's Changing Security (and Attack Surfaces)2024-09-10

Just and Task: Modern Alternatives to Make That Don't Make You Cry2024-09-03

Kubernetes CronJobs: Scheduled Tasks That Don't Silently Fail2024-08-27

VictoriaMetrics: When Prometheus Gets Too Hungry for Your Hardware2024-08-13