Insights on technology, leadership, productivity, and personal growth in the tech industry.
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Home Assistant ships an MCP server in Core now. I wired it into Cursor so my AI assistant could query and control 50+ devices, and hit a VLAN routing problem and a transport mismatch on the way.
Apple devices were bypassing my Pi-hole by querying 8.8.8.8 directly. I fixed it with RouterOS NAT redirection - silently rerouting all external DNS queries to Pi-hole, with round-robin load balancing across three instances.
Pi-hole shows IP addresses when there are no matching DNS records. I audited every static DHCP lease across four VLANs and added an Ansible playbook to keep device names in sync automatically.
The story of migrating from Gmail to Proton Mail with custom domains, using SimpleLogin for email aliases, and how this forced me to review and secure all my accounts.
I finally had x86 hardware to run a proper MDM stack. After working through MicroMDM and NanoMDM, the architecture wasn't the real problem. User Enrollment restrictions make MDM almost useless for personal devices without Apple Business Manager.
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