The nuts and bolts of networking — from VLANs to VPNs, and DNS to dynamic routing.
Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Which DNS Ad Blocker Should You Use? I have run both. Pi-hole has been my primary DNS filter for over a year, and I spent three months with AdGuard Home running in parallel on a test network to give it a fair evaluation. They solve the same problem. They both work […]
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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
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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
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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
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It was 7:20 PM GMT on November 18, 2025. I was finishing up some configuration changes to ReadTheManual’s self-hosted infrastructure when I noticed something odd: my Cloudflare tunnel had gone dark. No big deal, I thought, probably a blip. Then I checked Twitter. Spotify was down. ChatGPT was offline. Even Trump’s Truth Social had gone
When Hyperscalers Fail: What Three Major Outages Taught Us About Internet Resilience Read More »
Calculate subnet masks, CIDR notation, wildcard masks, and host ranges in seconds. Built for network engineers, system administrators, and anyone configuring IP networks. From the field: I built this because I got tired of doing subnet maths in my head during planning sessions. Whether I am designing an Azure VNet or segmenting my homelab, having
Free IP Subnet Calculator: CIDR, Subnet Masks & Network Planning Read More »
This is day one of something big. ReadTheManual is the new home for hands-on tech learning — homelabs, self-hosted tools, career-focused projects, and a growing community of makers and mentors.
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