Blogs
Mailcow vs Docker Mailserver
Below is a comparison of two very popular email servers for self hosting your own email, mailcow and docker-mailserver. Both are actively developed and I have used both but in the end I switched to docker-mailserver. That may not be the best choice for everyone and both projects are very good email servers. I am not going to claim one is better that the other for every situation but instead document why docker-mailserver was a better fit for my use case. In the end you can’t go wrong with either one.
January 23, 2023
Getting Started With a Home Lab
A well designed home lab is a marvel of a thing and a source of endless possibilities for useful services to make life easier without sacrificing privacy. If you are new to creating a home lab then the first question is where to start. After running my home lab for a few years now I can easily say that the most important place to start is at the router coming into your home. It is the entry point to everything and a capable full featured router is essential to everything you will do and is the front line of defense to what can be a hostile Internet.
March 15, 2022
Geoip Blocking Made Simple
While no solution can be 100% reliable because of the way IP addresses move around, below is a simple and efficient option to blocking access to a server from specific geographic areas of the world. After several months of watching port scans and web probing of my VPS servers it became apparent that 90% of of this type of traffic comes from 2 specific countries, Russia and China. While Fail2ban is a great tool for stopping both types of activity it became apparent that there needed to be a complimenting security implementation to simply block all IP traffic from these locations since I am not expecting or wanting any access from them anyway.
September 21, 2021
Tech to Avoid Big Tech
There are a lot of very good reasons to NOT use the services of big tech companies and this is not that article. There are other very good sources as to why this is a good idea. If you believe you “have nothing to hide” then you really should do your own research as to why that is not a valid argument. Instead, the focus of this post is to share what some of the best alternatives are that you can deploy yourself, often using free open source projects. It is more of a list than a ‘how to’ based upon my experience using various options and selecting what worked best for me.
August 30, 2021
Migrating From Pfsense to Opnsense
I’ve been running pfSense for a few years now. Compared to a typical commercial home router it is hands down better and more powerful than anything the home consumer can buy off the shelf and it runs for free on most cheap, used hardware. pfSense has served me well but there have always been a few things that bothered me. Namely: Updates are few and far in between. That’s not what you want from a security standpoint and is one of the major drawbacks of most consumer routers. The manufacturers soon abandon them and stop providing firmware updates. New features never seem to happen. In 2 1/2 years I don’t remember any real new features popping up. There have mostly been just a few obscure things I didn’t need or use and so didn’t really notice. The one new feature I was interested in was WireGuard support and that turned into a major mess that had to be completely pulled from the product shortly after it’s release. Netgate does a great job of scaring the open source community with every press release. They always have a way of leaving you wondering if they are really committed to open source or whether they intend to leave the community version of pfSense to die a lonely, slow and painful death. Netgate has a real public image problem. They have been publicly nasty to the community and most organizations they deal with, especially when it comes to OPNsense. After the WireGuard fiasco I finally decided enough was enough and I did not want to trust my home lab to pfSense any longer. There was just way too much drama that never seemed to end. OPNsense was always on my list to take a look closer at because it was a fork of pfSense (without the attitude) and had a reputation of a cleaner, more modern UI, with a better focus on security and providing updates.
May 8, 2021
Adguard Home vs Pihole
A few years ago I tried PiHole on an old Raspberry Pi 2B that I had lying around and it didn’t take more than a couple of days to realize that I needed this as a permanent part of my home network. I shortly thereafter graduated it to a VM running on my Proxmox server where it has served faithfully and reliably with no real complaints.
April 15, 2021
Piwigo Automatic Thumbnail Creation
Piwigo is a great application for storing your online photo galleries and sharing them with friends and family. With a bit of setup work it can be a great replacement for Google Photos that is actually much better in many important ways. Such as you actually retain ownership of your own photos! Yet, one feature has been missing from Piwigo for some time now: the ability to automatically generate the thumbnails for new pictures as they are uploaded to the website. There are numerous people asking for this and a few suggested options appear here and there online but the proposed solutions always had some problem which made think “there must be a better way”.
April 10, 2021