Mail Relay at Home: Postfix Smart Host

How to build a reliable home mail relay using Postfix as a smart host with msmtp clients on Linux workstations, enabling sendmail-compatible outbound email for scripts and system alerts.

February 19, 2026 · Updated today · 5 min · Roland Hill

A Git-Backed Home Lab Knowledge Base with BookStack

How I built an internal BookStack knowledge base where Markdown in a private Git repo is the source of truth, synced automatically by Gitea Actions, with public posts derived only by a manual, reviewed step.

October 1, 2026 · Updated today · 7 min · Roland Hill

Automating Let's Encrypt for Internal Hosts with DNS-01 and SSH Push

How I replaced a dozen ad hoc certbot setups with one central acme.sh instance. It uses DNS-01 validation through Cloudflare and pushes each certificate to its host over SSH.

October 1, 2026 · Updated today · 8 min · Roland Hill

Homelab Monitoring with Grafana, Loki, Prometheus and Alloy

How I centralised logs and metrics for my homelab with Grafana, Loki, Prometheus and Grafana Alloy, and what I learned about push-based collection, alerting and code-generated dashboards.

October 1, 2026 · Updated today · 9 min · Roland Hill

An ESPHome LED Matrix Display: From Wiring Plan to PCB

Designing a Home Assistant connected LED matrix display using a LilyGo T7-S3, a P5 64×32 HUB75 panel and ESPHome, and the lessons from planning its wiring, power and eventual PCB.

October 1, 2026 · Updated today · 7 min · Roland Hill