Field notes
Homelab, self-hosting, and Claude Code
I'm Jayson Stemmler, a data scientist who runs a homelab and self-hosts more than is strictly sensible. This site collects the things I've learned that weren't obvious — problems that took real digging to diagnose, written down clearly enough that the next person doesn't lose an evening to them.
Each debugging post opens with the wrong hypothesis first, because that's usually what you currently believe. Every command shown was actually run, and every number is real.
Recent posts
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It wasn't the 10GbE adapter
- Symptom
- Transfers to the NAS ran at gigabit speeds over a link the Mac reported as 10Gbase-T, full duplex, active
- Cause
- The two machines were on different subnets, so every packet went through the gateway instead of staying on the switch — because I had filed the NAS on the management network when I built it
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How to tell whether you actually got an agent team
- Symptom
- Agents appeared in the panel and there was no way to tell whether a team had formed, whether they coordinated, or whether these were plain subagents
- Cause
- The only live record is a config directory deleted when the session exits, and the obvious ways to read it return false positives
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My cameras were eating the 2.4GHz band
- Symptom
- Nest Hubs randomly dropping off WiFi and refusing to reconnect; an Apple TV on the same 2.4GHz IoT SSID stuttering while streaming from a local Plex server
- Cause
- UniFi cameras streaming 143 GB/day of video over 2.4GHz, pinning channel 1 at 95% airtime and starving every other client of transmit opportunities