self-hosted Guides & Tutorials

Couchside: your movies, shows and live TV, on your own server, above a screenshot of the home page

Couchside: A Fast, Self-Hosted Media Server with Live TV and DVR

Couchside is a free, open-source media server for movies, shows and live TV: one small program with a built-in DVR, your own channels and no cloud account.

Cartoon neon robot wheeling glowing crates of data from an old server tower to a new one

K3s

Back Up a k3s Node and Restore It 1:1 on New Hardware

How I back up my single-node k3s cluster on Ubuntu and restore it 1:1 onto new hardware — same IP, SSH identity, volumes, and Kubernetes secrets intact.

Neon isometric harbor crane lifting a glowing shipping container onto a stack at a dark synthwave dock

Kubernetes

Portside: The Agentless Kubernetes Dashboard That Replaced LogMk

Portside is an agentless, self-hosted Kubernetes dashboard that streams pod logs live from the K8s API — and why I retired LogMk's MySQL log pipeline for it.

Neon isometric gate guarding the mouth of a dark data tunnel, in magenta and cyan

WAF

Thorngate: A Tiny Go WAF That Guards Your Cloudflare Tunnel

Thorngate is a zero-dependency Go WAF for Cloudflare Tunnels: honeypots, IPv6 /64 bans, weeks of searchable request history and an admin portal to manage it.

Terraria

Scale-to-Zero Terraria on k3s with Wake-on-Connect

A TShock Terraria server pegs a CPU core 24/7. Here's a tiny Go proxy that scales the k3s StatefulSet to zero when idle and wakes it on first TCP connect.

Neon isometric render of replicated storage volumes across a k3s cluster, representing Longhorn distributed storage

K3s

Make Your k3s Local Storage Persistent with Longhorn

Install Longhorn on your k3s cluster to replace node-bound local-path storage with replicated volumes, and migrate existing PVC data safely, step by step.