About
Why another homelab blog exists.
I am Matija, a SecOps engineer responsible for security automation across a large software estate. At home, I operate a smaller estate with a surprisingly similar ability to produce incidents at inconvenient hours.
Packets & Regrets documents what happens when production habits meet home-lab constraints: small budgets, imperfect hardware, no change board, and one operator who is also the person asking why monitoring went red.
This is not a gallery of dashboards. Posts focus on decisions, evidence, failure modes, and verified repairs. Config snippets are reduced and sanitized, but the technical conclusions are real.
What you will find here
- Incident reports where the service looked healthy but was not working
- Architecture decisions and the trade-offs behind them
- Container, Linux, storage, network, and backup operations
- Security controls that remain worthwhile outside an enterprise
- Measurements instead of claims when measurements are available
Disclosure boundary
Public writing deliberately omits credentials, public addressing, camera details, directly reusable network maps, active vulnerabilities, and anything else that would turn documentation into reconnaissance. The private operational wiki remains private.