Research Findings
Short write-ups from homelab and engineering work. Everything here is tested and new: each finding was reproduced in a test setup before publishing, and checked that it isn't already written up somewhere online.
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How WireGuard keepalives keep a stale conntrack blackhole alive
After a WireGuard VPN server restarts with a new internal address, a stale Linux connection-tracking entry can blackhole the tunnel, and the VPN's own constant keepalive packets keep that dead entry fresh so it never expires, leaving the tunnel dead until you flush it by hand.
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A Reolink camera's reported CPU doesn't track its 4K encoder load
Reolink cameras expose a "CPU usage" number people trust to judge whether the camera can encode 4K, but it measurably fails to track the video encoder — most likely because it reports the separate management processor — so it can read low while the encoder is actually maxed out.
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A pcomm= field that secretly doubles old LogQL comm= filters
In Loki, searching for the text `comm=` (a program's name in Linux audit logs) accidentally also matches `pcomm=` (the parent program's name), so once logs start carrying that parent field, every existing rule that searched `comm=` silently doubles its hit count.
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A LogQL wildcard alternation that silently matches nothing in Loki
In Grafana Loki (a log-search database where alert rules are text patterns), a natural wildcard OR-pattern like `argv=.*chmod|argv=.*chown` silently drops the `.*` and matches almost nothing — confirmed from 3.4.1 through the current 3.7.7 — so a security rule written that way never fires and never warns you it is broken.
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One dead camera can crash the whole gst-rtsp-server
GStreamer's RTSP server library — the code behind most self-hosted "restream my cameras" servers — has a leftover debug assertion that crashes the entire server process when a stream connects but never sends video, so one dead camera takes down every feed.
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A go2rtc producer lock that freezes every camera stream
go2rtc, a widely-used open-source camera-stream router, has a bug in its current release where one source that starts then hangs makes the code hold an internal lock forever, freezing every other stream, its own health watchdog, and even shutdown.
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Why auditd syscall rules are catastrophic on a KVM host
Linux's built-in per-syscall audit logging is uniquely ruinous on a machine that hosts VMs, because each VM's virtual CPUs fire millions of low-level calls per second and auditing each one adds about 12x CPU, enough to burn multiple physical cores (and ~100W) while the guests sit idle.
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A US Mitsubishi IR remote maps °F to °C by an irregular table, not the formula
A US-market Mitsubishi heat-pump remote converts Fahrenheit to Celsius with an irregular lookup table rather than the arithmetic formula, so any infrared code set built by interpolating sends the wrong temperature at several settings.
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Blackwell NVENC changes its codec header on every restart
An NVIDIA Blackwell GPU's hardware H.265 encoder emits different codec-configuration bytes each time it restarts, even with identical settings, which quietly breaks browser video playback that assumes those bytes stay stable.