Home Network Guy

Occasionally I have been asked for hardware recommendations for OPNsense and the question appears on Reddit frequently.

Modems have a web-based interface which allows you to view information about the status of your modem including signal strength and quality as well as logs about the connectivity to your ISP.

When you are upgrading your home network and/or building a homelab, you will likely need to troubleshoot various network issues especially as the number of devices/services continues to grow.

The topic of reverse proxies can be difficult or confusing to understand when you are new to the concept.

One of the most common ways to set up a home network with OPNsense is to use the following configuration: Internet > modem > OPNsense > network switch(es) > end devices/wireless access points.

I was recently assigned a laptop to use for work so I wanted to create a new VLAN only for my work laptop to keep it segregated from my own network.

Remote administration tools such as Remote Desktop, VNC, etc. are great for controlling systems without needing to be physically present.

I have long considered self-hosting my own Git server to use for personal projects, but I never took the time to do so.

Understanding how to forward ports and create firewall rules for the WAN interface of your router is important if you wish to access services hosted on your router or a server in your internal network.

When you first learned to write firewall rules in OPNsense, you may have simply used the pre-defined aliases for the network interfaces/ports and IP addresses such as “LAN net”, “LAN interface”, “HTTP”, “HTTPS”, etc.

Have you wanted to take a look at OPNsense without installing it to a dedicated machine and/or deploying it as your primary home router/firewall?

I have been running Plex Media Server for quite a few years and enjoy self hosting all of my family’s media files.

After I migrated my home server to use Proxmox, I began searching for a new offsite, cloud backup solution.

Last Summer I built an airplay enabled outdoor speaker using a Raspberry Pi.

Previously, I wrote about how to configure DNS over HTTPS using DNSCrypt-Proxy.

When I first set up my home network using my OPNsense router and was learning firewall rules, I took the approach of allowing only the Unbound DNS service on OPNsense to be accessed and blocking access to all other DNS servers.

For a number of years, I have used Crashplan as my offsite backup.

As I have mentioned in my how-to on creating an isolated network, I have several Amcrest IP cameras (affiliate link) on an isolated network which I use mostly as high quality baby camera monitors.

I recently bought the Amcrest video doorbell (affiliate link) since I like my other Amcrest IP cameras, and I wanted a doorbell that was less cloud connected (the Amcrest doorbell requires an online account for the initial configuration but can be used co…

When my family is spending time in our backyard especially when weather is nice, there have several times we brought a small Bluetooth speaker outside with us so we can have a little bit of music while the kids are playing.

A DMZ (demilitarized zone) is a segmented part of a network that is used to host all publicly accessible websites and services.

When I decided to do a fun project with my old Raspberry Pi 3B+, I purchased the 4GB model of Raspberry Pi 4 to have as a replacement (update: now they have an 8GB model that would be nice to have).

When searching online, you will find many ways to improve wireless performance.

Getting flooded with unwanted emails is an issue that everyone faces.

WireGuard is a modern designed VPN that uses the latest cryptography for stronger security, is very lightweight, and is relatively easy to set up once you understand how it functions in OPNsense.

If you have any software/services hosted on your home network that you wish to access remotely, you may have encountered a situation in which your public IP address changes periodically.

When you are new to creating VLANs on your network, you may wonder about the necessary steps in order to create a properly functioning VLAN.

After installing OPNsense, the default login is the root user.

In my network, I created an alias for all of the ports I have open on my server so that I can create firewall rules to allow several of my VLANs to access the services hosted on my server.

Sunny Valley Networks is a company that has partnered with Deciso, the creators of OPNsense, to create a plugin called Zenarmor (formerly Sensei) which adds deep packet inspection and more to OPNsense.

When looking up information on how to write firewall rules in OPNsense, you may be looking for specific examples on how to block or allow certain types of network traffic rather than how to write firewall rules in general.

A VPN server can provide an encrypted connection to your home network.

Cable Haunt is a recent vulnerability that has been found in over 200 million cable modems in Europe and likely many more in other countries as well.

There are two common ways of accessing your home network remotely and securely: a SSH server or VPN server.

Historically, DNS is a service that was designed to be unencrypted.

When I upgraded to Nextcloud 17 from Nextcloud 16, I noticed that they transitioned to a fancier, rich text editor in place of the plain text editor.

On my home network, I host a few public facing services that my family and I make use of when away from home such as Plex Media Server.

After I set up VLANs on my home network, I quickly noticed that I could not access the web administration page on my TP-Link T2600G-28TS L2 managed switch (affiliate link) from a different VLAN even though I had allowed access for my PC via a firewall rul…

When I initially created VLANs on my UniFi wireless access points, I was still new to VLANs in general, and I was not quite sure how to configure my network switch.

A few months ago, I switched to using my own cable modem instead of using the ISP provided modem/router, and I wanted to access the web interface for the cable modem status.

One nice thing about utilizing more advanced router features is that you can do neat things such as using your own domain name in your home network.

When setting up Cloudflare for this website, I decided to try it out on some sites that I had setup on my home network.

After the long journey of learning more about IPv6 and how to enable it on my home network (see my page for detailed info), I discovered that I broke some functionality.

IPv6 was drafted in the mid-1990s when it was realized that IPv4 addresses would quickly be exhausted due to the explosive growth of the Internet.

If you are new to firewalls like I was when I decided to build my own router/firewall, it can take some time to fully understand and feel comfortable implementing firewall rules.

It is not uncommon for many home networks to utilize an all-in-one network device provided by the users’ Internet Service Provider (ISP).

In this guide, I will be demonstrating how to set up a LAG (Link Aggregation Group) using LACP.

Those who use or own Ubiquiti UniFi products mostly are familiar with the UniFi Controller.

Now that you have Pi-hole and Portainer setup within Docker (perhaps on a Raspberry Pi (affiliate link) ?)

The concept of defense in depth is nothing new.