I’m Laszlo Kohanyi. A sparky in the IT business.

Technology and gadgets always fascinated me. First I learned how to disassemble things - and I have to admit, it took me years longer to learn how to put them back together. I just love to see how things work.

I grew up with the Internet. Started on a 486 with a dial-up modem. Used Linux from kernel version 1.8. There was a time when my hard drive died and I lived off a SuSE live CD for months because I had no money for a replacement. That period made me fall in love with Linux - even if it meant constant battles with the X server and CUPS to get a printer working. Twenty-five years later, things have ironed out. It works, almost out of the box, and I appreciate the developers’ effort every day.

Back then, as a teenager, there were no off-the-shelf routers. You had to use a computer. My first home server was a Pentium I with three network cards - because three NICs were still cheaper than a hub. So at an early age I learned how IPv4 works, how iptables rules go together, how to separate my family’s traffic from mine.

Having an always-on server became a requirement for my comfort. Files available everywhere, centralised services. This was the genesis of my homelab - though nobody called it that back then. I’ve scaled up and scaled down over the years, keeping an agile lab that grows with my needs.

In elementary school I asked the maintenance guy if I could help fix things. He gave me a 10 mm wrench and a cup of nylon nuts. During break times I replaced the loose ones on school benches. That was my first real project.

But electricity was the magic. The best gift I received at age ten was batteries and Christmas lights. After that came relays, transistors, capacitors. When it was time to choose a career, it was obvious: I wanted to be an electrician. I wanted to scale things big - from Christmas lights to street lights.

I applied for an apprenticeship at the DNO and got it. I earned my degree with their help, which led straight into my first job. On the job, my managers realised I was handy with computers and networking, so I ended up in a specialised team working on early smart metering and communication between meters and the utility company. That gave me a taste of real industrial scale.

It led me to my next role: maintenance electrician for a key building that carried the Hungarian Internet. From there, I scaled with the Internet itself. Now I work in a hyperscale data centre in the UK.

The philosophy:

I’m not at war with Big Tech. I use their services every day. But I believe in having a plan B - the same way a data centre keeps its generators maintained and ready. They’re not running 24/7, but when the grid wavers, they take the load.

That’s what this site is about. Being ready to take the load.

I run my own infrastructure at home - 10 Gbps networking, multiple servers, an AI stack - and I’m always tweaking. Every recipe here is something I’ve actually built, broken, and fixed.

Life is short and expensive. Make it count.