Tutorials

Reverse proxies are powerful tools used typically to forward client traffic to a server. In contrast to a forward proxy, a reverse proxy sits in front of web servers or other servers and forwards client traffic to the appropriate server. In this post, I will show you how to easily setup a reverse proxy using Docker, forward the necessary ports to the reverse proxy, and configure the reverse proxy to forward traffic to various servers on your network. Specifically, I will show how to setup the reverse proxy for se with WordPress, though the applications of this reverse proxy are endless! ...

A Little Background and Some Thoughts With today’s technology, we are constantly bombarded with High Energy Visible (HEV) blue light from our screens as well as inconsistent lighting throughout the day within our homes and workplaces. Like all mammalian species, we humans have our own circadian rhythms which occur naturally and are vitally important to our health and well-being. Rather than writing an essay on the importance of our natural circadian rhythms, check out the educational write-up from the NIH here. Hopefully this will help explain the “why” of this particular post. ...

IoT Overview The smart world of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices is ever growing. From everyday lightbulbs to the sprinkler out front, just about every household appliance and utility has a smart-counterpart. For example, my smart home is fully Apple HomeKit compatible and consists of a Hue bridge with lightbulbs, Lutron Caseta smart dimmers/switches, Eve Aqua outdoor water hose control, iSmartGate garage door opener, Schlage deadbolt, Eve motion sensor, Sonos speakers throughout the house, a Vocolinc oil diffuser, Vocolionc power strip, a couple iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaners, some Vocolinc pluggable outlets, an Ecobee thermostat to replace each analog thermostat in the house, and a Unifi G4 Doorbell (the doorbell is not technically compatible with HomeKit, but I added support with a third-party tool known as “Homebridge”). On top of all these smart home devices, I have a handful of other Unifi Protect cameras around my property. ...

Overview The purpose of this post is to provide some tips to address some network security concerns when hosting an externally-facing web server from a device within your home network. For this post, I will be using Unifi networking gear. My screenshots will be of the Unifi controller on my Unifi Dream Machine Pro (UDMP), but I will do my best to overview the concepts so you can replicate with your own networking gear. Let’s get started! ...

Update 03/20/2022: I no longer host my site with Traefik, and my site is no longer built on WordPress. I now host my site internally using an Nginx proxy hosted in Docker. My site is built with Hugo. Learn more about my transition from WordPress to Hugo on my post here: Migrating from WordPress to Hugo My first post will, appropriately, show you how to build your own self-hosted Wordpress site utilizing Docker (just like this site)! For this setup, I am using a Ubuntu bare-metal machine behind a Unifi Dream Machine Pro . You can use a VPS or an OS on bare-metal capable of running Docker (for this tutorial though, we will use tools only applicable to Ubuntu, but you can make adjustments where necessary if you are familiar with Docker and choose not to use Ubuntu). Check out this project’s GitHub page for examples and help. ...