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Goodbye Docker Traefik, Hello k3s: Migrating 24 DuckDNS Routes to cert-manager TLS

When your home lab outgrows Docker Compose, the reverse proxy becomes the first casualty. I ran Traefik as a Docker container with its own ACME resolver — issuing per-domain TLS certificates via DuckDNS DNS challenges. It worked for a year. Then k3s entered the picture, and everything broke.

This post documents the real, messy, iterative migration of 24 DuckDNS domains from Docker Traefik to k3s IngressRoutes backed by a single cert-manager Certificate with HTTP-01 challenges. Including the disk pressure evictions, corrupted Traefik images, and ACME email misconfigurations that happened along the way.

Agent Orchestration in Practice: How Nocturna Uses Hermes for Kanban Automation

Most AI agent demos stop at a chat window. Nocturna goes further — it's a full kanban control center that spawns Hermes subagents, runs scheduled tasks via cron, delegates work to peer agents, and manages it all through a real-time board UI. This post walks through the actual integration architecture, with code from the Nocturna repo.

Building Nocturna — The Hermes Kanban Control Center

After months of running Hermes Agent for home-lab automation, I needed a visual way to track, manage, and replay tasks. Nocturna was born: a React + Express kanban board that connects to Hermes in two modes — Gateway (HTTP API to a remote instance) or Local CLI (spawns the hermes binary directly).

Nocturna provides a visual kanban board for Hermes tasks, supporting both remote Gateway API and local CLI modes.

DRM-free at Last: How I Made VRT MAX Watchlist Downloads Work on Raspberry Pi

VRT MAX streams are DRM-protected and notoriously hard to download. After weeks of work involving pywidevine, N_m3u8DL-RE, and a custom _vrt_drm_* field detector, the thuis-v4 downloader now gracefully handles both DRM and non-DRM content. This post covers the full journey — from detecting DRM in the HLS manifest to the fallback strategy that keeps non-DRM downloads fast.