Grumpy
grumpyadmin.com · field guide, in progress

Rants from the machine room.

Fix it. Build it. Zero it.

One angry engineer, a hundred rabbit holes. Building things that don't catch fire twice, wood that doesn't warp, relays that don't weld shut — and writing down what happened when they did.

Most "outages" are just neglect with a timestamp attached.
— the grumpy admin

Rant categories

pick your poison
AI & ML
Models, inference, the whole racket.
1 rant
Solar & Battery
Photons in, pill stacks out.
1 rant
IoT & Boards
Tiny chips, big opinions.
0 rants
Woodworking
Sawdust & precision.
0 rants
Security
Locks, logs & very bad boxes.
1 rant
Firearms
Range reports & respect.
0 rants
Homelab & Hardware
Servers, storage, who owns what.
3 rants

Latest dispatches

ARCHIVE →
NOV 26 mins

CLI said healthy. The dashboard said NOPE.

An automatic upgrade split a bundled data source into a standalone plugin and left it owned by the wrong user. CLI healthy, UI empty. One chown fixed it.

Homelab & HardwareRead →
NOV 25 mins

Email for a personal domain: 90% DNS, 10% praying it isn't spam

You don't host email on a personal domain — you just bribe the DNS gods until it lands in your own inbox.

Homelab & HardwareRead →
NOV 26 mins

I made my solar monitor less clever and it finally worked

First I built a BLE-crypto reverse-engineering monster. Then I rebuilt it as a $0.70 microcontroller that just asks the server. Guess which one stopped breaking.

Solar & BatteryRead →