Mini Update

Hello everyone!

There has been a gap between the last post and this (The migration post doesn’t count as I wrote it before but forgot to publish it). Life happened, so I had to take care of some IRL work.

However, I have been home-labbing quite hard. In fact, one reason for not able to write was I was upgrading and configuring my homelab.

These are some updates regarding to my homelab

Changing Or Migrating Your Network Backend

There will come a time when you may need to move your networking stack to a different machine due to a variety of reasons. By networking stack, I mean applications core to the functionality of your homelab, such as your DNS server, reverse proxy, Wireguard instance, etc.

I personally had to move thrice

• When I had to change the IP addresses of all my machines due to a weird edge case involving Wireguard
• When my Raspberry Pi was not powerful enough for all my micro-services, and shifted to a physical machine
• When I switched from a physical machine to a Proxmox VM

Every time I switched, there was always something or the other which I missed which affected my operational stability. But like they say, you learn as you make mistakes.

What is DNS and why you need your own local DNS?

Whenever it comes to a discussion regarding DNS, I would like to initiate it with this famous Haiku.

Explanation: You may think that the network issue was due to something serious, unlike DNS. You may be absolutely convinced that it’s not due to DNS. But after debugging the issue for an hour, you will finally come to the conclusion that it was indeed due to DNS.

What exactly is DNS?

As there are various blogs on the internet which goes on detail about what DNS is, I will oversimplify DNS with a single line; it’s a phone directory for the internet.

Making DNS and A Reverse Proxy Work Together

What is a reverse proxy anyway?

Ever since I started home-labbing, one thing that always annoyed me was typing the IP and the port number to access a certain service.

Can’t we have a nice and memorable way to access each service?

One approach is to create local DNS entries, i.e., map the MAC address of your server to a static IP. However, this only solves the IP problem, as I would still have to enter the port number. The ideal solution would be something like DNS subdomains. Let’s look at an example

Creating SSH Keys In A Different Way

I have some different habits when it comes to technology, which has led me to develop some “weird” workflows. To be honest, anyone who is in this field for some time has such habits. Today I’ll talk about generating SSH keys.

The usual suspects

Consider this scenario

You have a VPS to which you connect via SSH. It’s a good habit to turn off password authentication to improve the security of your server. So, being a responsible sys-admin, you generate an SSH key-pair from your PC and transfer it to your VPS using ssh-copy-id. Once you see your password-less login working, you turn off password-based authentication (PBA). Your login is now seamless.

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