I've been tinkering with ESPHome recently, trying to add some air quality sensors to my household. There's a lot of good tutorials out there, but they almost universally have one thing in common: they assume that the end goal is Home Assistant integration.

Which is cool piece of software, but I don't have any use for it right now. All I want is to monitor few air quality parameters, send the metrics to metrics DB and render nice graphs in Grafana which I already have for monitoring other stuff.

Previously, I wrote about my favorite home lab metrics DB. This time I wan to talk about another component of monitoring stack - about log aggregation.

Spoiler: this post is going to be about Grafana Loki and how the promise of cost effectiveness and ease of operation works really well in the unique environment of home lab and small self-hosted networks.

The man page says that sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser or another user, as specified by the security policy. However most of the sudo use that I've seen/done is really a privilege escalation with switched user being just a consequence of that. Even the famous XKCD 🥪 webcomic shows sudo being used in this way. Most of the time this small difference does not really matter, but sometimes it's really inconvenient.

This is mostly a note I've written for my self so that I can quickly recall how to sudo when I really only want to do something without the su part. Let's have a look at another less popular but sometimes quite a bit more appropriate option.

In the previous article I've looked at economic side of using cold storage for Rustic backups. In this part I'll look at technical side of things - setting up the cold storage, migrating existing repository to this backend and restoring from backup.

There's alternative implementation of Restic rewritten from scratch in Rust - Rustic. It offers some extra neat features. One such feature is support for cold storage. This blogpost started as my research notes to figure out whether it makes financial and technical sense to use this. I've ended up writing two articles in the series. This part focuses on economic (both financial and complexity) cost of such solution.