Leo's Lab

Using Pangolin to unify my networks

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One of the things that’s been bothering me about my homelab is that it’s really two separate networks. When I’m home, everything works: I can reach my services, my MetalLB IPs, my VPS over Hetzner. When I’m traveling, I’m cut off. My VPS on Hetzner has no way to reach the homelab either, which means any cross-site automation I’ve wanted to build has just been a non-starter.

The obvious answer is a VPN. I’ve used Tailscale before and it’s great, but I wanted something I could migrate away from if needed, and I didn’t want to self-host the control plane. After some research I landed on Pangolin using the Pangolin Cloud, mostly because I’m not confident in setting up a DMZ yet.

Running kubernetes on Jetson AGX Orin

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I ran across a NVIDIA sale last Christmas for the Jetson AGX Orin. On paper it had 64GB of LPDDR5 and GPU with 2048 CUDA / 64 Tensor Cores, it runs Linux, it is power efficient, and it is battle tested for edge AI use cases. I’ve always wanted to run some models locally so this sounded like a good choice. I want to run some language, vision, and speech models on this machine and make it the AI brain of my homelab.

Automate from day one with FluxCD

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I finally finished filling out my mini racks and migrated my homelab to Kubernetes. I followed a similar setup to this amazing guide: https://k3s.guide/

One of the things I was really grateful for in this experience was how much having FluxCD from day one helped me and saved me so much time. I know a lot of people find ArgoCD difficult and daunting to set up, but FluxCD is much simpler and feels more suitable for homelab needs.

State of the homelab

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I started on my homelab not too long ago during Thanksgiving. It has been a crazy journey, but I have made some good progress. Today is the last day of 2025, and I want to document the state of my homelab and what is coming in 2026.

Hardware

Building a media server was the first milestone in my homelab this year. I had a 2018 Mac mini that was no longer worth much as a trade-in. I had wanted to repurpose this machine into a server for a while now but never invested the time.

How to explain homelabbing to your family

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently started a new and exciting hobby: building a homelab and self-hosting. This gave me a renewed sense of excitement about technology and helped relieve my career burnout. If you’re one of my friends whom I recently convinced to start a homelab, I ’m sorry (not really). You are about to join many others in experiencing a hobby that is fun, tiresome, but deeply rewarding.

As a software engineer, why one would want a homelab is pretty obvious to me. But this wasn’t easy to explain to my wife. We tried to find online articles that explained some of the benefits, but nothing really stood out. I figured that other homelabbers will face this issue too, so I’ve set out to write a blog post to help explain my new hobby to my family.

Using python generators

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What are generators

Generators are a type of function or expression in Python that enable you to provide an iterator. A great example of a generator function is the range function used frequently in for loops. Iterators generated by generators are lazy, which means that they are not evaluated until you access the next element, making them memory efficient. The iterator will yield one value at a time until the next function is called.