Homelab

Here is the whole idea in one sentence: I control Spotify from a Mac OS 9 machine, over the Gopher protocol. This is a real System 9 desktop. The now-playing, the search, the queue — all of it is plain Gopher menus going to a box in my closet. That screenshot is the fun part. The load-bearing part is duller and more useful, and it’s the reason a 2001 Power Mac and a 2024 Android phone can both talk to the same server without sharing a single line of code. ...

Or: how fifty-nine builds taught me that someone has to own the state, and why I shipped b59 with the seams still showing. Last week I put Spotify on Mac OS 9 over Gopher. That post ended with a small confession baked into the architecture: the “client” on the OS 9 side was Netscape Communicator, browsing gopher menus. It worked — Netscape speaks gopher:// natively, and a menu of tracks is just text — but it’s a browser wearing a remote-control costume. Every action was a page load. There was no queue, no now-playing that updated on its own, no seek bar, no app. ...

Streaming 2026 music on a 1999 Mac via a 1991 protocol. Because the only thing better than making old tech work is making it work wrong.

Some boys arrive at the ranch and you hear them before you see them. This one arrived and we never saw him at all — not for half an afternoon, anyway. The fault was not his. The fault was a cable that lied. The forasteiro showed up on a Tuesday. ARM64. RK3588. Eight cores, an NPU nobody at the ranch had drivers for, dual 2.5G Realtek NICs, one M.2 slot, one SATA port, sixteen megabytes of SPI NOR flash. He’d been living in Debene Ranch for months already, under a different name — Rock NAS, dressed in Armbian, serving ZFS over NFS like a proper homestead servant. But Dom Felipe had retired him from that job. The kid wanted something else. ...

🎬 ABERTURA Câmera abre num galpão escuro. Luzes piscando. Som de cooler. Ao fundo, uma silhueta masculina com 24 cores se forma na fumaça. É ULTRA2. Plim plim. Entra a música tema: 🎵 “Detalhes tão pequenos de nóóóós… Um swap que ninguém pediu, um kernel que não rodóóóu…” 🎵 CAPÍTULO 1: A CHEGADA DO FORASTEIRO Era uma noite quente em Debene do Sul, pequena fazenda de servidores às margens do Rio MoCA 2.5. Dona Felipe, matriarca da família e dona de todas as terras (e dos /24 inteiros, que ela mesma fez questão de subnetar com as próprias mãos), recebia um forasteiro vindo de longe. ...

🎬 OPENING CREDITS Camera opens on a dark warehouse. Blinking lights. Sound of cooling fans. In the background, a masculine silhouette with 24 cores forms in the mist. It’s ULTRA2. Plim plim. (That’s the iconic Brazilian soap opera sound effect.) Theme song plays: 🎵 “Such tiny details of us two… A swap nobody asked for, a kernel that wouldn’t boot through…” 🎵 CHAPTER 1: THE STRANGER ARRIVES It was a hot night in Debene Ranch, a small server farm by the MoCA 2.5 River. Dona Felipe, matriarch of the family and owner of all the land (and all the /24 subnets, which she personally configured by hand), received a stranger from afar. ...

TL;DR — A new Intel Core Ultra 9 285H (“ultra2”) joined my homelab this week. First Geekbench 6 run scored 1471 single / 12864 multi. That’s slower than the i7-12900K next to it on the rack. Six hours, two Talos upgrades, three diagnostic jobs, and one DaemonSet later, single-core jumped to 3090 (+110%). The villains: an outdated kernel, UKI silently ignoring extraKernelArgs, and a vendor BIOS that thinks PL2=75W is a reasonable default for a chip rated for 115W. Here’s how the diagnosis went. ...

I needed 40 Gbps between two machines: intel9: Ubuntu 24.04, running K8s + misc services xeon2zfs: TrueNAS SCALE 25.10.3, serving storage via NFS The plan: Deploy InfiniBand FDR (40 Gbps), run IPoIB for network services, eventually layer NFS over RDMA if I felt fancy. The hardware: Two Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro cards from eBay ($20 each), one unmanaged QDR/FDR switch ($35), some cheap QSFP cables. Should be plug-and-play, right? VPI cards, support both Ethernet and InfiniBand, auto-negotiate, just works™. ...

There’s a moment in every homelab evolution where you stop and ask: what am I actually buying when I buy infrastructure? For me that moment came two weeks ago, staring at a renewal email from a SaaS I won’t name, doing back-of-the-envelope math on a Synology I almost ordered, and pricing out an EKS cluster for a side project that — let’s be honest — was never going to leave my apartment. ...

The Question Nobody Asked (But I’m Answering Anyway) I have an IBM POWER8 server from 2014. It has 160 hardware threads. It draws 400W at idle. It sounds like a jet engine warming up. I compiled .NET 8 from source on it, then built Jellyfin 10.11 in nine increasingly desperate attempts, and now it’s streaming movies to my living room. My wife thinks I have a problem. She’s correct. But that’s not the point. ...