Things that broke at 2AM
Write-ups of real homelab failures and how they were actually fixed — Unraid arrays, dying HBAs, GPU passthrough, local LLMs, game servers. Error strings included so search can find them when it happens to you.
- Plex buffering at the start of every episode? Check disk spin-up
A 10-15 second stall before playback on Unraid, and Plex was blameless. How to prove it's spin-up, plus the per-disk spindown gotcha.
- Two GPUs on Unraid: one for Plex, one for a local LLM
Pinning GPUs per container, why UUIDs beat device indexes, surviving Xid wedges, and picking a model that actually fits 16 GB of VRAM.
- Pterodactyl on Unraid: Panel + Wings, start to finish
A real Pterodactyl build guide for Unraid: Panel, Wings, reverse proxy, plus the passthrough-mount and Cloudflare gotchas the official docs skip.