Security

For years I used a commercial password manager. It worked fine. Then the price went up, there was a security incident that made the news, and I found myself wondering why I was paying monthly for something I could run myself on hardware I already owned. That’s how I ended up on Vaultwarden. It’s been running in my homelab for months now, it’s never gone down, and I’ve not thought about it since the initial setup. This post covers why I made the switch, how Vaultwarden works, and exactly how to set it up. ...

Port forwarding has a bad reputation, and honestly, most of it is deserved. You open a hole in your router, expose your home IP to the internet, and spend the next week watching fail2ban block login attempts from IP ranges you’ve never heard of. There’s a better way. Cloudflare Tunnels let you expose self-hosted services to the internet without opening a single port on your router. Your home IP stays hidden. The traffic goes through Cloudflare’s network. And setup takes about fifteen minutes. ...

Most people’s home network looks like this: an ISP-provided router sitting in the corner, doing everything — routing, DHCP, DNS, NAT, and whatever passes for a firewall in consumer networking gear. It works. Until it doesn’t. If you’re running a homelab, self-hosting services, or just care about what’s happening on your network, a proper firewall is one of the most valuable things you can add to your setup. And with tools like OPNsense, it’s more accessible than ever. ...