A Vevor weather station that can only upload to Weather Underground, a Raspberry Pi 3 pretending to be wunderground.com on its own isolated wifi network, and weewx-interceptor catching the data. Plus the WPA2 handshake that failed nine times out of ten, and the console clock that was an hour fast.
My GPS-disciplined time server dropped off the network and I didn’t find out for 24 days. The cause wasn’t the hardware, and it wasn’t what I assumed twice along the way — it was a permanent DNS record aimed at an address the router was free to hand to somebody else.
A small Proxmox cluster, a managed switch or two, some IP cameras, and Home Assistant eventually stop being a pile of gadgets and start being infrastructure. Here’s how I built observability, a live topology graph, and an AI-assisted ops layer for mine — without letting anything have unsupervised write access to the network.
How a Raspberry Pi 5, a cheap u-blox GPS module, and chrony turned into a home stratum-1 time server — the wiring mistakes, the serial-port gotcha nobody documents, and the PPS upgrade that took accuracy from ±50ms to ±350ns.