The thoughts of Clint Dilks
The mirror never lies, but it rarely tells the whole truth. Each morning I face it, waiting to see whether it will reveal the person I believe myself to be, or the one the world insists on seeing. Some days, the reflection feels like an ally – steady, familiar, even kind. Other days, it feels …
For most of my life I have been a systems builder and a problem solver. I thrive on helping people get things done. Sometimes this has meant starting something completely new, but more often than not it has meant building onto something that already exists. I often think of this as adding layers to an …
For a long time, my homelab has been a mixture of curiosity, ambition, and unfinished intentions. Like a lot of personal infrastructure, it did not begin as a grand design. It grew in layers. One machine became two. One service became several. Something useful would appear, then something interesting, then something I thought I should …
Systems are built for people, and people remember names much more easily than numbers. So even if they never think about it directly, DNS matters to people. It is one of the quiet cornerstones of any environment. Without it, we are left remembering strings of numbers and building mental maps that only work as long …
A dashboard is one of those services that can seem unnecessary right up until the moment it starts to matter. On paper, Dashy did not really give me anything I did not already have. My services already existed. The URLs already worked. Internal DNS was in place. Reverse proxying was in place. If I wanted …
If you want to become a sysadmin, the first thing I would say is this: courses can help, but they are not the thing that will carry you. A couple of relevant courses may help you get an interview. They may help your CV look more complete. They may help a recruiter decide that you …
y the time I got to the reverse proxy, most of the hard work had already been done. The hosts had been rebuilt. Internal DNS was working. Services had names. I could reach what I needed to reach. Dashy was beginning to give the lab a shape that felt more human and less like a …
There are some services you build because they are interesting, and others you build because they answer a real need. Immich was always in the second category. Photos are not just files. They are memories, context, and the shape of a life over time. They are easy to collect and surprisingly easy to lose track …
Linux has always had a certain mythology around it. Part of that mythology says that Linux is somehow above the kinds of endpoint protection conversations that Windows has had for years. Some of that came from the old days, when Linux was less visible, less common in enterprise estates, and less frequently treated as a …
There are some parts of a homelab that are enjoyable because they let you do something new. A new service appears. A DNS name starts resolving. A dashboard begins to feel useful. A site goes live. A photo library opens in a browser and stops being an idea. Backups are not like that. Backups belong …