About
About Dalil Tech
It is one person, no company. A homelab that took over a rack, a 3D printer running in the wrong climate, and a habit of building the tool I needed when the ones online were wrong or drowning in ads. That habit turned into this site: free tools and honest guides for people who build and tinker with tech.
Who is behind this
I am Mohammed Almuhanna, one person and not a company. I have a computer science degree and a homelab that has slowly eaten a 22U rack. A Synology DS1522+ on a shelf running SHR-1, a UniFi Pro Max 16 PoE switch mounted in the rack on a bracket I printed myself in PETG-CF, and an old gaming PC, an i9-9900K with an RTX 3080, that I gutted and rack-mounted as a Proxmox server. It runs more Docker containers than I can really justify: a media stack, photo and file self-hosting, a couple of small local LLMs, and a Minecraft server I keep meaning to kill. There is no UPS in that rack, on purpose: they are priced absurdly where I live and my grid is stable, so the money went to an offsite backup instead. When a page here says I do not run something, it says so instead of pretending. That is the kind of person writing these guides.
The 3D side is a Bambu Lab H2S with hardened nozzles, sliced in Orca. I vent it out the window through an adapter I printed and an AC Infinity inline fan, because I run it indoors in a hot, dusty corner of the Gulf where a lot of the usual advice about cooling and warping just falls apart. I had an Ender 3 years before that, so I have done the cheap-and-fiddly end too. I have also spent real time on a Bambu A1 and a Creality K2 Plus, both borrowed to print parts in parallel while the H2S worked through a big job.
Why this site exists
I built these tools because I kept needing them and the ones I could find were wrong, buried in ads, or both. So I made my own and made them free. It started with what I actually run, homelab, self-hosting, and 3D printing, and it grows into whatever I hit next that is worth a proper free tool instead of a bad one. Every tool runs entirely in your browser, shows the exact formula it uses, and has an automated test suite behind it, so the math is checked on every change instead of taken on faith. If a number is an estimate, like battery runtime, I say so instead of pretending it is precise.
I have opinions, and I will tell you them
I run SHR-1 on my Synology at home, which is single-drive redundancy, and I think it is fine for a home NAS as long as you keep a real offsite backup. Plenty of people will tell you single parity is dead. For a backed-up home array, it is not. The tools will not hide the tradeoff from you. They show exactly how much safer RAID 6 or RAIDZ2 would be, and then you decide. That is the pattern everywhere here: when there is a clear better choice I will name it, and when it is genuinely a judgment call I will tell you which way I lean and why, instead of hiding behind "it depends."
The guides come from doing it
Not from rephrasing spec sheets. When I say ASA holds up to heat and sun better than PETG, it is because I have watched PETG sag in a parked car out here. I have also wasted real money on hardware that did not do what I assumed it would, more than once, including one I had to return and eat the shipping on. Saving you a few of those calls is half the point of the place.
Privacy and money
No accounts, and nothing to sign up for to use any of it. The only analytics is a privacy-respecting, cookie-free page count, so I can see which tools actually get used, not who you are. The tools stay free. The site is funded by affiliate links, always marked, and I will not recommend gear I would not run myself. There is also an optional email list if you want a heads up when a new tool or guide lands, no spam, ignore it if you prefer.
Contact
Corrections, suggestions, or a sharp disagreement are all welcome at founder@dalil-tech.com. If I got something wrong, tell me and I will fix it.