Spin up a three-node Garage v2 S3 cluster on UnRAID + Ubuntu, add a slick WebUI, then wire Duplicacy to push encrypted, deduped backups—complete with cron jobs, Telegram alerts, and zone-aware triple replication—for a zero-friction, homelab-ready safety net.
Claude’s MCP lit a spark: in a weekend I taught GenieACS to talk to LLMs. Using Go, GoReleaser and GitOps, I exposed seven tools so an AI can list devices, reboot routers or flash firmware through a single /mcp endpoint.
After almost decade in DevOps I spend as much time digging through forgotten repos as shipping code. Updating Sentry led me to GlitchTip, Redis Sentinel and hours of code-sleuthing—proof that documentation gaps turn DevOps into full-time software archaeologists.
When df lies and du swears, look for Loki’s orphaned WAL segments. Our prod cluster filled up every week until we purged legacy boltdb-shipper data from S3. Postmortem, fix steps, and preventive checks summarized.
After seven years running clusters I finally built my first Kubernetes Operator—a Redis PoC in Go with Operator-SDK. This post demystifies CRDs, reconcile loops, defaults, secrets, and status conditions, sharing hard-won lessons and next steps for anyone Operator-curious.
