I recently found out that Libreboot, a distribution of open-source boot firmware, had been ported to the ThinkPad T480 and T480s. I had some time off work, and decided to install it on my laptop for fun.

In this post, I’ll walk through the process I used to install it, and some general tips for anyone trying to do the same.

In my previous post I wrote a bit about how I monitor my home server, and how I use Grafana Beyla to get traces and metrics from services with no existing telemetry.

This time, I’m going to go through how to set up your own observability stack for home server scale, and how to start collecting metrics, logs, and traces.

I’ve been running a home media server / homelab for about six months now, running the usual bunch of services with Jellyfin to serve everything up. Besides a brief misadventure with Kubernetes, it’s been pretty reliable, and I don’t use a single streaming service anymore.

The only issue is that I’m a security analyst by trade, so I’m obsessed with making dashboards, and none of these services provide any metrics. Thankfully, there’s a way around that.