Dave Juntgen — WritingHomelab infrastructure, IaC, AI-agent systems, and engineering leadership.https://juntgen.com/The Backups That Weren't: A Stale Fingerprint and Two Months of Silencehttps://juntgen.com/writing/28-the-backups-that-werent/https://juntgen.com/writing/28-the-backups-that-werent/Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTOver-Engineered, Then Obvious: Standing Up Our First Family AI Agenthttps://juntgen.com/writing/family-agents-01-over-engineered-then-obvious/https://juntgen.com/writing/family-agents-01-over-engineered-then-obvious/Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTPart 27: A Self-Hosted OpenRouter for the Family — Deploying LiteLLMhttps://juntgen.com/writing/27-litellm-router/https://juntgen.com/writing/27-litellm-router/We added LiteLLM as a multi-tenant gateway in front of our local Ollama, so each family member's future Hermes agent — and OpenWebUI — gets its own revocable API key with per-key model allow-lists. Along the way, three things forced us to slow down: a Postgres container that looked alive but wasn't, a base64 password that broke Prisma's URL parser, and a Qwen 3.6 model that wrote 300 tokens of thinking and zero tokens of answer.Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTPart 26: The SDE/SDM Review — Bugs Hiding in Plain Sighthttps://juntgen.com/writing/26-sde-sdm-review/https://juntgen.com/writing/26-sde-sdm-review/A code quality review of the monitoring stack found three critical bugs — including one that had silently broken all Docker log collection since day one. Sometimes the most dangerous failures are the ones that don't make any noise.Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTPart 25: Eliminating the Last Snowflakehttps://juntgen.com/writing/25-juntgencom-monorepo/https://juntgen.com/writing/25-juntgencom-monorepo/The juntgen.com Astro site was the last unversioned snowflake in the homelab — no git history, no IaC, 8 blog posts behind. We moved it into the homelab monorepo and made it deployable with the same command as everything else.Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTPart 23: Replacing Portainer with Ansiblehttps://juntgen.com/writing/23-replacing-portainer/https://juntgen.com/writing/23-replacing-portainer/Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTPart 24: Building a Grafana Dashboard That Actually Workshttps://juntgen.com/writing/24-monitoring-grafana-dashboard/https://juntgen.com/writing/24-monitoring-grafana-dashboard/Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTPhase 3: Backups with Proxmox Backup Server and Google Drivehttps://juntgen.com/writing/19-backup-pbs-gdrive/https://juntgen.com/writing/19-backup-pbs-gdrive/Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTConsistent Time Sync Across All Proxmox Hosts with Chronyhttps://juntgen.com/writing/20-chrony-time-sync/https://juntgen.com/writing/20-chrony-time-sync/Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTPhase 2: Monitoring and Observability with VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, and Lokihttps://juntgen.com/writing/21-monitoring-observability/https://juntgen.com/writing/21-monitoring-observability/Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTSecurity Audit: Scrubbing Usernames and Secrets from a Public Git Repositoryhttps://juntgen.com/writing/22-security-username-scrub/https://juntgen.com/writing/22-security-username-scrub/Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTAnsible Best Practices: Six Things We Fixed Before They Became Problemshttps://juntgen.com/writing/18-ansible-best-practices/https://juntgen.com/writing/18-ansible-best-practices/Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTOpenClaw Round Two: LAN Deployment, Linger Lessons, and Caddy Integrationhttps://juntgen.com/writing/17-openclaw-round-two-lan-deployment/https://juntgen.com/writing/17-openclaw-round-two-lan-deployment/Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTCleanup Day: Revoking Dead Tokens, Fixing the Vault, and Learning to Ask Before You Buildhttps://juntgen.com/writing/16-cleanup-day-tokens-vault-deploy/https://juntgen.com/writing/16-cleanup-day-tokens-vault-deploy/Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTOpenClaw on Dedicated VM: IaC-First AI Agent Deploymenthttps://juntgen.com/writing/14-openclaw-research-deployment/https://juntgen.com/writing/14-openclaw-research-deployment/Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTOpenClaw Day Two: Chasing Ghosts, Trusting the Tunnel, and Closing Security Debthttps://juntgen.com/writing/15-openclaw-day-two-hardening/https://juntgen.com/writing/15-openclaw-day-two-hardening/Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersistent Terminal Sessions on the Control Node with Zellijhttps://juntgen.com/writing/13-zellij-persistent-sessions/https://juntgen.com/writing/13-zellij-persistent-sessions/Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTLessons Learned: AI-Assisted Infrastructure as Codehttps://juntgen.com/writing/07-iac-lessons-learned/https://juntgen.com/writing/07-iac-lessons-learned/Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTWhy Infrastructure as Code? From Manual Configs to Git-Driven Homelabhttps://juntgen.com/writing/02-why-iac/https://juntgen.com/writing/02-why-iac/Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTClaude Code: How an AI Pair Programmer Made Me a Super Full Stack Engineerhttps://juntgen.com/writing/01-claude-code/https://juntgen.com/writing/01-claude-code/Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTGitOps for Docker Stacks with Portainerhttps://juntgen.com/writing/04-gitops-portainer/https://juntgen.com/writing/04-gitops-portainer/Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTMoving Caddy to the DMZ: Isolating Your Reverse Proxyhttps://juntgen.com/writing/05-caddy-dmz-migration/https://juntgen.com/writing/05-caddy-dmz-migration/Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSecurity Review: Hardening a Homelab IaC Repohttps://juntgen.com/writing/06-security-review/https://juntgen.com/writing/06-security-review/Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTAnsible from Scratch: Bootstrapping a Fleet of LXC Containershttps://juntgen.com/writing/03-ansible-bootstrap/https://juntgen.com/writing/03-ansible-bootstrap/Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSudoers Demystified: Understanding Privilege Escalation in Your Homelabhttps://juntgen.com/writing/08-sudoers-demystified/https://juntgen.com/writing/08-sudoers-demystified/Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTLinux File Permissions Deep Dive: The Bits That Protect Your Homelabhttps://juntgen.com/writing/09-file-permissions/https://juntgen.com/writing/09-file-permissions/Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTAutomating Sudoers with Ansible: Never Manually Edit Sudoers Againhttps://juntgen.com/writing/10-ansible-sudoers/https://juntgen.com/writing/10-ansible-sudoers/Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTAnti-Patterns and War Stories: Sudoers Mistakes That Break Things at 3 AMhttps://juntgen.com/writing/11-anti-patterns/https://juntgen.com/writing/11-anti-patterns/Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSites, DNS, and MOTDs: A Productive Homelab Sessionhttps://juntgen.com/writing/12-personal-website-dns-motd/https://juntgen.com/writing/12-personal-website-dns-motd/Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT