Posts

Introduction As a network engineer, I’ve always dreamed of announcing my own BGP routes and peering with others. I wanted the experience of running a decentralized BGP network not just in a lab environment, but in a real, persistent setup that could run indefinitely. After some research, I discovered DN42, a community-driven platform that makes this possible without requiring expensive ASNs or public IP allocations. With DN42, I can establish my own autonomous system, peer with other network enthusiasts, and even run my setup on a home router or a Raspberry Pi. This blog will document my journey into self-hosted BGP, the challenges I faced, and how I built my own decentralized network. If you’re a networking enthusiast looking to explore BGP beyond traditional environments, you’re in the right place! ...

DNS: how It All Works Ever wondered how DNS resolves domain names? How does it work behind the scenes? Well, in this blog, I’ll take you on a fun ride through the magical world of DNS resolution. Whether it’s Google’s famous 8.8.8.8 or Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1, you’ll finally understand what’s happening when you type a domain into your browser. DNS: Your Internet’s Phonebook 📖 DNS (Domain Name System) is basically the internet’s way of giving websites easy to remember names instead of expecting you to memorize IP addresses (because let’s be honest, no one remembers 172.217.14.206). No matter how often an IP address changes, you only need to remember the domain name, and DNS takes care of the rest. ...

I self-host several services in Docker containers, and some of them rely on a MySQL server. One of these containers is Wiki.js, where the frontend runs in a separate container while the database is managed by the MySQL container. Wanting to back up the MySQL server, I initially committed the running Docker container under a different name, thinking this would create a backup that I could restore later. However, I quickly realized this wasn’t a proper backup solution. If I needed to download and run the backup elsewhere, I considered uploading the committed image to Docker Hub, but it wasn’t a practical approach. ...

After self-hosting my mail server at home on a Raspberry Pi, I frequently encountered internet stability issues. Sometimes, my fiber connection would get damaged due to nearby construction work, and other times, my ISP would schedule maintenance, causing outages that lasted for an hour or more. These incidents made me realize that hosting my email server at home was risky, I could lose important emails if my internet went down. As a result, I started looking for alternative options like Freemail and Fastmail. However, these services either offered only a free trial or limited storage (around 1GB), whereas I wanted a free and simple mail service with a decent amount of storage. And by default, domain registrars do not provide email services. If they do, it is usually a paid feature. ...

Introduction At my previous company, which provides IT solutions to clients in the USA, we specialized in managing and delivering hospitality IT infrastructure. This included tasks like pulling LAN and fiber cables, configuring and installing routers, cameras, GPON systems, Wi-Fi planning, and more. In 2023, few of our clients faced an issue with remote access to their NVR (Network Video Recorder) using the client application. Upon debugging the issue, we discovered it was related to Dynamic DNS (DyDNS). While installing cameras and NVRs at client properties, we provided remote access using Oracle’s DyDNS service. However, DyDNS failed to resolve client IP addresses properly, even though those IPs were correctly mapped to DyDNS domains. ...

Introduction I saw a few posts on the subreddit r/selfhosted about self-hosting mail servers on cloud VPS. At the moment, one thought occurred to me why not self-host my email server at home rather than relying on a cloud provider’s VPS!. This led me to wonder what I’d need to set up a fully functional email server for personal use. Rather than using a traditional server-grade PC. I decided to try it on a Raspberry Pi, which is small size and low power consumption make it an ideal choice for use as a home email server. ...

Introduction I was experimenting with the Raspberry Pi DTS tree setup, and as soon as I saved the configuration, it asked for a reboot however, after rebooting the machine, I was unable to access the Wikijs service. When I was troubleshooting the problem, I saw that the default docker bridge IP address that it was assigned had changed for both wikijs (frontend) and mysql (backend database). When I rebooted the raspberry PI, both of its containers IP addresses changed. Then I updated their IP address by altering an environment variable. Suddenly it occurred to me that if I reboot the Raspberry Pi several times, I may need to reconfigure the IP address of the wikijs container multiple times. ...

Introduction Since starting my homelab journey in December of this year, I’ve been attempting to self-host certain services that I find useful in my daily life. Here I want to share the list of service that I am self host. My mini homelab My home lab setup currently consists of three primary components, a SOHO Mikrotik router hEX S (poor man’s router), an old laptop (which I used to self-host stuff before purchasing Raspberry Pi), and a Raspberry Pi 5 named Devtest. ...