The nuts and bolts of networking — from VLANs to VPNs, and DNS to dynamic routing.
SSH tunneling on Ubuntu explained with worked examples. Local forwards (-L), remote forwards (-R), dynamic SOCKS proxies (-D), and when each is the right tool.
SSH Tunneling Explained: Local, Remote, and Dynamic Forwards Read More »
Real terminal output, captured live – not a mock-up. The Most Important Interview Question in Infrastructure If you interview for any infrastructure, DevOps, or networking role, you will be asked some variation of: “What happens when you type a URL into a browser and press Enter?” It is, without exaggeration, the most common technical interview
What Happens When You Type a URL (The Full Journey) Read More »
Real terminal output, captured live – not a mock-up. It’s Always DNS There’s a running joke in IT: when something breaks, it’s always DNS. Like most good jokes, it’s funny because it’s true. I’ve been woken up at 3am more times than I can count, and the root cause is DNS more often than everything
How DNS Actually Works (And Why It’s Always DNS) Read More »
You Use It Every Day. Do You Actually Know How It Works? You’re reading this over the internet. You probably checked your email, scrolled through LinkedIn, and maybe streamed something this morning — all over the internet. It’s so embedded in everything we do that we’ve stopped thinking about it, the same way you don’t
From ARPANET to Your Router: How the Internet Actually Works Read More »
How the Internet Actually Works You use the internet for everything. Do you actually know how it works? This four-part series covers the foundations of the internet — from the Cold War military project that started it all, through the systems that make it function today, to the 60-year history behind every cloud VM you’ve
How the Internet Actually Works | Complete Guide Series Read More »
Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Which DNS Ad Blocker Should You Use? I have run both. Pi-hole is the filter running on this site’s own network; AdGuard Home’s feature set below is drawn from its documentation and community deployments, to give it a fair evaluation. They solve the same problem. They both work well. But they
Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Which Should You Use? Read More »
How to Install Pi-hole on Windows (WSL2 Guide) I will be honest upfront: running Pi-hole on Windows via WSL2 is a compromise. It works, and there are legitimate reasons to do it, but it is not the ideal deployment for network-wide DNS filtering. If you have a spare Raspberry Pi, an old laptop, or a
How to Install Pi-hole on Windows (WSL2 Guide) Read More »
How to Run Pi-hole in Docker (DNS Ad Blocking with Docker Compose) If you are already running Docker on your server, putting Pi-hole in a container is the obvious choice. Your DNS service gets the same isolation, portability, and reproducibility as every other service in your stack. You can version control the compose file, blow
How to Run Pi-hole in Docker (Complete Guide) Read More »
How to Install Pi-hole on Ubuntu 24.04 (Network-Wide Ad Blocking Without a Pi) Most Pi-hole guides assume you are running a Raspberry Pi. That is where the name comes from, and it is a perfectly good deployment target. But plenty of people have an Ubuntu server already running in their homelab, or a spare mini
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How to Set Up DuckDNS for Free Dynamic DNS (Raspberry Pi and Linux) Before I set up proper internal DNS, DuckDNS was the glue holding my remote access together. I had a Raspberry Pi running a handful of services at home, a residential IP address that changed every few days, and no interest in paying
How to Set Up DuckDNS for Free Dynamic DNS (Raspberry Pi and Linux) Read More »
