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....

For those who want to use Calico with k3s instead of Flannel, I am sharing here the steps I followed. For the project I am working on, I had to re-install k3s with Calico upon learning that flannel works on layer-2, whereas I need layer-3 routing for BGP. I am not sure if there’s a way to advertise BGP with flannel as the CNI but it looks like Calico already runs it natively....

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....

Grafana has always been on the top of my learning list ever since it was introduced to me in 2018. I was just a user back then and never really had the chance to configure a monitoring stack along with it. Proxmox already has its own dashboard showing sufficient information, but since I would need to be monitoring multiple systems at once, then I feel like this is the perfect time to start learning Grafana....

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....

Unraid is a hypervisor by itself. So aside from just running docker containers, you can also spawn VMs. I wanted to install Ubuntu Server 22.04 so I could run the GNS3 remote server on it. Ubuntu Server Installation You can download the Ubuntu iso image from this page. It’s either you download to your local machine or using Unraid with the help of the CLI or some docker app. While waiting for the download to complete....

Moving files within Unraid One of the first questions I asked myself is how can I transfer files from an external drive to one of the shares in my array. This is so I can use that external SSD as another cache pool in my Unraid setup. And SpaceInvaderOne saves the day again. I summarized his video below. Follow at your own risk or better yet just watch SpaceInvaderOne’s video here....

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....