About
I'm Nour. I work as a Linux administrator, and I run a small homelab at home — the kind
that starts as one spare machine and quietly turns into a stack of services your household
now depends on. This is where I write down what I learn keeping it alive.
How this is written
Worth saying plainly: these posts are AI-assisted. I pick the subjects, I run the things
worth running, and I edit what comes back — but I draft with an LLM. On a blog that covers AI
tooling, pretending otherwise would be a bit ridiculous.
What that means for you as a reader:
- The long pieces — storage stacks, networking, the Linux From Scratch series — come out of
work I actually did on my own hardware. Real output, real mistakes, real recovery. - The short app notes are lighter: something I came across, tried, and formed an opinion
about. They're a scan, not an audit. They live in their own section so you can tell the
difference at a glance.
If I get something wrong, tell me and I'll fix the post.
What's here
| Linux | Storage, filesystems, the networking stack, systemd, internals. The long-form half. |
| Linux From Scratch | Building a complete system from source, one package at a time. |
| Self-hosted | Services worth running on your own box, and what it costs to keep them up. |
| Apps | Shorter notes on software — what it replaces, where it breaks, whether I kept it. |
| DevOps | Orchestration, CI, deployment. |
| AI | Models and local inference as a subject, not as a product pitch. |
There is also a Practice section — a Linux quiz with an exam-simulation mode, shell golf, and a daily terminal puzzle.
Who it's for
You'll get something out of this if you run your own servers, want to understand storage and
networking rather than copy commands, and would rather read a postmortem than a feature list.
You probably won't if you're after step-by-step beginner tutorials, video, or enterprise
software reviews.
Under the hood
Ghost, self-hosted on my own hardware, behind a Cloudflare tunnel. Custom theme. Umami for
analytics — no cookies, no individual tracking. No newsletter, no membership wall, no comments.
Contact
Email is available on request. Reporting a broken tool? Include your browser and OS.
Suggesting one? Tell me what problem it solves. I answer real technical questions.