Tag: networking

ntopng vs darkstat: full DPI flow analysis vs a tiny always-on stats page. Pick the right tool for home-lab network visibility without losing your mind.

FRR vs BIRD: two open-source routing daemons compared for BGP, OSPF, and home-lab dynamic routing. Which one belongs in your stack?

HAProxy vs Envoy for L4/L7 load balancing — config style, performance, observability, service mesh fit, and which one belongs in your home lab.

LibreNMS auto-discovers your switches, APs, and UPS over SNMP with zero MIB hunting. Here's how to deploy it and stop abusing Prometheus for this job.

SmokePing turns your ISP no-issue-detected excuse into a documented lie. Set it up in Docker and get clear visual proof of latency spikes and packet loss.

Authelia is a bouncer. Authentik is the whole security desk. Pick the right self-hosted SSO for your home lab — with working configs, gotchas, and a migration path.

Pipe ZFS incremental snapshots through WireGuard to a friend's NAS or a remote VPS. Encrypted in transit and at rest — no rsync.net bill or vendor lock-in.

Headscale gives you all the magic of Tailscale's zero-config WireGuard mesh — without trusting a SaaS control plane. Deploy it end-to-end with Docker Compose, ACLs, MagicDNS, and exit nodes.

A honeypot sits quietly on your network pretending to be something valuable. When someone touches it, you know you have an intruder. OpenCanary makes this dead simple.

Browser ad blockers miss half the ads. DNS blocking kills them everywhere — TV, phone, game console, everything. Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: here's which one to run.

iptables is being phased out. nftables is faster, cleaner, and already the default on modern Linux. Here's how to actually use it without wanting to quit.

Snort invented network intrusion detection. Suricata multi-threaded its way past it. Here's how to set up real IDS/IPS on your home lab and actually understand what it's telling you.