What is a VPN? A VPN is a service that digitally connects a device and a remote server, creating a point-to-point tunnel. For our use case this lets us access our self-hosted services that can only be accessed when we’re connected to the homelab’s network. Another use case for VPNs could be to mask your IP address and sidestep website blocks. What is a Dynamic IP address and why does it make hosting a service harder?

Monitoring My Hugo Blog with Prometheus and Grafana Like a lot of Hugo users, I love how fast and simple a static site can be. But “static” doesn’t mean I don’t care about uptime, SSL expiry, or response times. I wanted an easy way to keep an eye on my blog (blog.wizard.cat) and get notified if something breaks. Here’s how I set up Prometheus, the Blackbox Exporter, and Grafana to build my own monitoring stack — all running inside LXC containers on Proxmox.

Context Just to give a background on how this blog is ran, this website is hosted on a docker container with nginx. Every time I updated this blog I would have to manually move the site data to my docker server, build the image, delete the last container and run the new container. This was quite a tedious process, especially if I didn’t update the blog often and forget how to solve the small bugs.

If you are someone that hates ads and telemetry a Pi-hole is a just must have. It is a network wide ad blocker that intercepts DNS queries and filters out unwanted domains. How does it work? A DNS (Domain Name Server) is a server that allows devices to translate human readable names (domains) such as youtube.com into IP addresses, think of it as sort of a yellow pages book. So when webpages want to display ads using a provider such as google AdSense, they usually contact the providers using their domain names such as ad.

It may be a surprise to many that most cyber attacks are relatively straight forward, exploiting well known vulnerabilities. So if you’re thinking of exposing your server to the internet, you should definitely think about server hardening. Server hardening is all about making your server secure by cutting out unnecessary risks. Think of it like locking all the doors and windows in your house. The way I harden my machines is by following this checklist of actions when setting-up a machine.