category: Networking

Before I started working on spinning up my 3-node K3s cluster, I was under the impression that Traefik would be one of the easiest to migrate from my docker setup since it already had some kind of native integration with Kubernetes in terms of available custom resources. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case as with my personal experience. Reading through the custom values yaml file and referring to the available documentation to figure out how the docker configuration compares to when deploying in K8s wasn’t as straightforward as I expected....

The past months have been crazy since the induction of my homelab. There have been so much reading here and there and a bulk of what used to be my idle time has since been allotted to technical research and self-development. My writing has not been able to keep up either because there have been a lot of changes and modifications I’ve been doing from the get-go. The network just reached the fourth month mark and it’s already about to undergo a somewhat major re-design....

In my previous post about my DNS, I mentioned there that I migrated Pihole from Unraid to my Proxmox hosting my router. But in fact, on top of that, I left an instance of Pihole on Unraid running inside a LXC container. Together with that I also configured keepalived for high availability. Hosting the DNS on the same hypervisor as my router should already be sufficient (I’d say my OPNsense VM is more likely to face issues than a LXC container) but I still wanted to try out an use case for keepalived....

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on making our home network stable after experiencing random reboots on my router and bombing the connection at home just right before leaving for work. All problems have been fixed now since the start of this month so I’ve had the time to continue with this other home project. Continuing from where I got off on k3s, I finally attempted to run a 4G EPC network in a small virtualized cluster....

I’ve been using Swag since I started with self-hosting. It’s been working flawlessly and I never had any issue with it. The only thing is if I wanted to expose a new service to the internet, I would have to configure it manually on a separate file. Swag already comes with the sample configuration files for most of popular services, though, it still felt like a chore I had to do before going to bed....

I was finally able to deploy a remote server in my parent’s house with the help of my sister. Guided her to install Debian, connect the LAN, and download a script I created to get tailscale up and running. Once the server was connected to my tailscale network, I was able to ssh from there and do all the remaining configuration. The server is planned for 24/7 uptime and since I only intended this to act as an exit node, I just sourced a cheapo HP T620 Thinclient with 2-cores, 8GB RAM, and 128GB SSD from some online store back home....

Pihole as our local DNS at home has been working perfectly fine. It blocks almost every ad there is whenever I am browsing. I was initially running it as a docker container within my Unraid server. The problem is every time I would restart Unraid for some experimental work, the internet of the entire house also goes down momentarily. I already tried defining a secondary DNS on my DHCP server but noticed some of my devices would randomly pick a DNS if there are multiple defined....

So this little thing arrived last week. Ever since I got my Unraid box up and running 24/7, I just felt I needed more control over the entire network. This is primarily because my existing home router would randomly drop packets and anyone who has planned to work from our home won’t be able to do so. As for the specs, it’s a fanless appliance running a quad-core Intel 12th-gen J6412 (2 GHz base, 2....

While working on creating my own kubernetes cluster I initially wanted to go with the official documentation for the installation process. But then I thought why not explore other distributions that can even simplify and reduce the time of the whole deployment process. This is when I came across k3s which claims to be an easier way of installing and managing kubernetes. K3s makes use of containerd as the default container platform but I opted to go with docker since I want to become more familiar with it....

While setting up Nextcloud on my Unraid server, there was a part where I had to port forward incoming traffic to a reverse proxy. Here I will show you how to set it up on my TP-Link router. The port forwarding function can be found in Advanced Settings > NAT forwarding > Virtual Server. Do note the name and location of this function can vary between brands and even models of the same brand....