Networking from first principles to production: DNS, DHCP, subnets, VLANs, VPNs and reverse proxies, demonstrated in the lab.
I’ve had an allotment for about six years. It’s a shed in a field with no mains power and no internet, so I put a server in it. This page is the build log. It covers what’s in the shed, how it’s powered and connected, the software running on it, and the three things that
I Put a Server in My Shed: The Off-Grid Allotment Pi Build Read More »
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 command output from a test machine, 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
What Happens When You Type a URL (The Full Journey) Read More »
Real command output from a test machine, 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
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 »
Nginx Proxy Manager on Raspberry Pi 5: Proper URLs and SSL for Your Homelab You’ve got Docker running. Portainer’s giving you visibility. Pi-hole’s cleaning up your network. And you’re accessing everything by typing IP addresses and port numbers into a browser like it’s 2003. http://192.168.1.100:8080 for Pi-hole. https://192.168.1.100:9443 for Portainer. Whatever port your next service
Nginx Proxy Manager on Raspberry Pi 5: Reverse Proxy Setup Guide with SSL Read More »
Pi-hole on Raspberry Pi 5: Network-Wide Ad Blocking and DNS You Control Of all the projects in this series, Pi-hole delivers the fastest return on investment. Not in some abstract career-value sense — in the “my partner just thanked me for making the internet less annoying” sense. Within ten minutes of pointing your router at
Pi-hole on Raspberry Pi 5: DNS Ad Blocking Setup Guide with Docker Read More »
Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Which DNS Ad Blocker Should You Use? I run Pi-hole on my 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 are not interchangeable, and the right choice
Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home (2026): Which DNS Ad Blocker Should You Use? Read More »
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 VPS, those are all better options. Pi-hole wants
How to Install Pi-hole on Windows (WSL2 Guide) Read More »
