Tag: networking

Mikrotik routers cost $50, run a real OS, and humiliate prosumer gear. RouterOS basics, VLANs, firewalling, and why your homelab probably needs one of these.

Two FreeBSD firewall distros, one bitter fork. pfSense vs OPNsense in 2026 — which one to pick for your home lab, and why the licensing drama still matters.

Zeek (formerly Bro) turns network traffic into structured logs you can actually query. The IDS that doesn't shout — it documents. Setup and use in a home lab.

traceroute lies. mtr tells the truth. Here's how to read packet-loss reports like an oncall engineer and stop blaming your ISP for the wrong hop.

Your gigabit link drops to 200 Mbps and you don't know why. iperf3 measures throughput honestly, nload visualizes traffic — together they find the bottleneck fast.

Expose Docker's Unix socket over TCP so remote tools and dashboards can connect — daemon.json config for Linux and Windows.

Go beyond basic UFW rules — rate limiting, geo-blocking, application profiles, logging, and before.rules tricks for serious firewall hardening.

Network aliases give containers multiple DNS names. Perfect for blue-green deploys and service discovery patterns.

Access services on the host machine from inside a Docker container using host-gateway or host.docker.internal — no hardcoded IPs.

Add load balancing and failover to your Docker setup using Swarm, nginx, HAProxy, and Keepalived — high availability without Kubernetes.

Harden your home lab against real threats — SSH hardening, fail2ban, network segmentation, backups, and preparing for when things go wrong.

OpenConnect replaces the bloated AnyConnect client on Linux. Run ocserv for a self-hosted Cisco-compatible VPN server — no 200MB installer required.