bear4est.com

Real homelab · Real failures · Real fixes · New video every 2 days

Our purpose

Homelab, networking and cybersecurity — built in the open, run for real, and fixed on camera when it breaks.

This is one lab that lives in a house, not a studio. Building it, wiring it, locking it down, watching it, and getting it working again when it quietly stops. Real hardware, real configs, real costs. Some episodes build something. Some secure something. Some are a post-mortem on the night it all went wrong.

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All green
Polling 12 checks--:--:--
Everything reports green that is the problem
watch -n5 'docker ps --format "{{.Names}} {{.Status}}"'
twelve checks, all passing, none of them proving anything

How an episode works

Same three beats, every time.

The tool changes from episode to episode. The shape never does.

01

Real infrastructure

Hardware that is actually in service, not a lab rebuilt for the camera. Four hypervisor nodes, six network segments, sixty terabytes usable, and a household that notices when it stops.

02

A real failure

Something that genuinely broke, with the dashboard still green the whole time. The outage is never the interesting part. Why nothing told me is.

03

The correction

The config change, the alert rule, the probe that would have caught it — then breaking it again on purpose to prove the fix actually fires.

The fix

Alert on what came out, not on whether the unit is running.

House rules: no real addresses, no real hostnames, no topology — every screen is generic, scale figures only. No sponsors. Open-source tools get named on screen; anything for-profit stays generic. Every failure shown here happened in this rack.

Topics

Seven things this channel covers.

Each one has its own page: how it is built, where it goes wrong quietly, and the command that tells you the truth.

Topic 01 · Today's video

Monitoring

Checks that pass without testing anything. Metrics that stop arriving and so never alert.

Open

Topic 02

Backups

Jobs that report success, verifies that skip what they already blessed, restores nobody has run.

Open

Topic 03

Virtualization

Guests frozen mid-snapshot. Agents that answer a ping while the thing behind them is wedged.

Open

Topic 04

Storage

Pools degraded under a healthy-looking summary. Disks failing under a name that moved.

Open

Topic 05

Network

Failover that pins to a dead link. Tunnels that stay up with nothing behind them.

Open

Topic 06

Smart home

Automations that silently stop firing. The alert that was supposed to wake you and did not.

Open

Topic 07

Security

Rules that vanish on reboot. Detections that only ever match you. Read-only that still leaks.

Open

Episodes

Out now, and what is next.

Two ahead, and no further. The rest of the list stays shut until the lab decides what breaks next.

Live now · Episode 06

My Storage Named The Wrong Disk

A job came in that said replace the failing disk. It named the disk, and it was wrong — the failing one was the other half of the mirror. Doing what it said would have pulled the healthy drive and turned a protected pool into a lost one. Nobody lied. One letter got inverted.

Full episode · 5:27 Vertical cut · 0:58

Every example is from my own rack. Every command on screen is checked against the project’s own documentation before it goes in.

08

Five Passwords On My Own Server

Prove It
07

69 Days Of Logs That Never Arrived

Silent Failures

Thread 01

Silent Failures

Things that broke with nothing alerting. A healthcheck that dials itself. A unit that reports alive while its worker is gone. A metric that simply stopped arriving.

Thread 02

Prove It

Breaking the lab on purpose, in a maintenance window, to watch whether the alert fires. A probe you have never seen fail is untested.

Thread 03

Built It

Not a failure and not a fix. Something gets stood up end to end, and the parts that quietly bite you get named on the way past.

Back the channel

The configs, not a thank-you note.

The videos are free and stay free. This is a tip jar, not a paywall. Every episode produces real artifacts — alert rules, compose files, healthcheck blocks, scripts — and backers get the files instead of pausing the video to retype them.

The full supporter page

Backing happens on Patreon. The page opens with video 1.

Tier 01
$3/mo

Camp

  • Your name in the supporter list
  • You help keep the videos free for everyone else
  • Nothing is locked. You are tipping.
Join Camp
Tier 02
$8/mo

Rack

  • Everything in Camp
  • The compose files, alert rules, healthcheck configs and scripts that appear on screen
  • Posted when that video goes up
Join Rack
Tier 03
$20/mo

Den

  • Everything in Rack
  • Your name on the end card
  • A vote on what breaks next, from a shortlist I post
  • No calls. No meetings. No monthly anything.
Join Den

Not a wrong answer.A check that cannot be wrong.

That is the whole channel.

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