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.

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