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Quick Update – 2020 – 2021

I’m still here, and doing Homelab stuff but most of my setup is up and running so very little maintainance to do and not much being added.

As off the end of 2020 we moved house and have moved over to a Fibre connection over PPPoE. I setup a Pfsense server and have connected a Unifi access point to it running as the firewall, however, did not write my process up as it was all pretty straight forward and Lawrence Systems on Youtube covers everything ( I really do mean everything 😀 )

In addition I have added a 3D printer to my office and have been using to print bits and pieces for the lab as well as decoration.

I do have some projects planned now that the lab is settled into it’s own rack and not just scattered across the floor. So please stay tuned for some more guides hopefully.

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Running pi-hole and PIVPN on a Raspberry Pi 3b+

Today we’ll be adding pi-vpn on the same raspberry pi 3b+ that’s running my local ad blocker pi-hole.

For those of you unaware pi-hole is a dns based ad blocker, all client requests are sent through it and those belonging to ad domains are dropped.

Pi VPN is used to access your local network when you’re out and about, for me it’s useful so I can access my servers and other applications remotely, but here the purpose of its installation is to provide ad-blocking whilst out and about as well as an added layer of protection when connected to public hotspots.

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Self-hosted Email with Docker and Mailcow

Whenever someone suggests self-hosting their emails there’s always a wave of people saying it’s too difficult or too much hassle, I took this information and decided to give it a go.

In this article I am using a DigitalOceon droplet, the reason for this is my homelab is on hardware that isn’t on all the time and on internal-only access which isn’t much use when you expect emails to arrive 24/7. You can host this in your home but you would need to set up port forwarding, firewall rules and if you’re in the UK like me probably DDNS.

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Bringing life back to an old Macbook PRO

In this post, I will talk about how I upgraded my old HDD to a cheap and fast SSD, and also upgraded and installed the MacOS onto the drive.

Back in 2012 I purchased an 13″ Macbook PRO, I used it heavily for many years but as time went on it got slower and slower to the point where it was replaced by a desktop PC and an array or laptops before onto my Surface Pro.

After leaving it wrapped in bubble wrap during my last 3/4 hour moves over the course of 4 years I finally decided to bring some life back to the machine and use it as a media center for my home entertainment downstairs to access my applications to download and stream, movies, tv, and music to the different systems I have set up in the house.

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