Private Internet Access (aka PIA) provides a cheap VPN service that allows up to 10 simultaneous devices. Recently I have switched from Surfshark to PIA because although Surfshark allows unlimited devices, having multiple connections in the same device (pfSense router) doesn’t always work. The reason is that different connections to different countries can have the…
In previous posts it was discussed how to create a DMZ network and host a website from a isolated VLAN on your network. That is a powerful resource, but with the limitation of not being possible to use a friendly FQDN such as geekistheway.com or mydomain.com as the frontend for the websites. This post will…
DMZ (aka Demilitarized Zone) network as defined by Wikipedia “is a physical or logical subnetwork that contains and exposes an organization’s external-facing services to an untrusted, usually larger, network such as the Internet”. The purpose is to add an additional layer of security by separating what is exposed a public service in the DMZ, while the rest of…
In this short post I will describe how to force your DDNS service to periodically refresh your IP on your pfSense. In theory, that should never be needed because when your WAN IP changes, DDNS service should notice it and update your IP on demand. However, I have notice my IPSEC tunnel never reconnected after…
On Wednesday, September 29th 2021 a widely used Certificate Authority (CA) from Let’s Encrypt expired and brought the world to its knees. Well, at least my homelab, anyways. The exact message would be something like “The following CA/Certificate entries are expiring: Certificate Authority: Acmecert: O=Let’s Encrypt, CN=Let’s Encrypt Authority R3, C=US” The fix is quite…
While I was writing a post on how to route specific WEB traffic through VPN, I’ve got inspired and decided to write another post on how to route specific DEVICES (your NAS server, laptop, iPhone, etc) through VPN while the rest of your house still uses the default ISP gateway. This kind of approach might…
For those who followed my previous post on how to configure a VPN client on pfSense, one cool application for it is to route only specific websites through the VPN while the rest of the traffic goes through the default ISP gateway, as usual. That is interesting when you want to use an IP from…
If you are like me, you probably got most of your gear at eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Craig’s List, OfferUp, etc. From time to time, things break or they come with missing parts, etc. I don’t know about you, but I go a long way to make my Homelab as nit as possible. Recently I’ve acquired…
In this post we are going to enable E-mail alerts for both our Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) and Proxmox Backup Server (PBS). The email server will be backed my GMail, which also works if you have Google Suite and a custom domain, such as yourdomain.com! Although I have separate PBS and PVE configuration in two…
In this post we are going to configure a NFS share on our Synology NAS so that Proxmox Backup Server can use it as storage (aka Datastore) for all VMs and container backups. The first step is to configure NFS share on your Synology, then we need to mount the NFS share on the server…