nzhillnet · Home lab, automation and self-hosting by Roland Hill

MagicMirror² Wall Dashboard, Now With Home Lab Pages

A MagicMirror² dashboard with weather, Home Assistant, Spotify, news, stocks and webcams, now rotating through two read-only Grafana pages for the home lab. Covers the hardware history, the kiosk setup and how Grafana is embedded safely.

Home Assistant Home · PC dashboard with Now, Needs attention, Rooms and Homelab columns: weather and indoor-outdoor temperature graphs, quick controls, line-art room tiles and home lab status

Home Assistant OS in My Home Lab: How It's Configured

A revised tour of my Home Assistant OS install: the device fleets, small but useful template sensors, e-mail and phone alerts, and a repo-managed PC and mobile dashboard suite with strict design rules.

The live comment box on a hillnet.co.nz post, showing one existing comment and a reply form

Self-Hosted Hugo Comments with Private Gitea

How I built a secure, self-hosted comment system for Hugo using private Gitea as the backend, proxied safely through Nginx.

Diagram of the Hugo publishing pipeline: writing and approval host, Gitea, build and publish host, and the public website

Automating Hugo Deployments (Git-Based Workflow)

How this site is published: posts are previewed, approved and committed from my home-lab console to a self-hosted Gitea, and a build host in the DMZ pulls read-only on a timer, rebuilds and syncs the site. Includes what I learned rebuilding it after losing the Git server.

Diagram of SSH and HTTP flows between the trusted workstation, DMZ web server, internal Git server and comments bridge

Locking Down SSH in a DMZ for Hugo Deployments

Hardening SSH to a DMZ web server revealed that my Hugo deploys also needed outbound Git access. Later I removed the inbound deploy trigger entirely, and that turned out to be the best hardening step.