Networking

One DNS change turned my home lab from a weekend project into something I actually trust

Your "ultra-fast" Wi-Fi 7 card is probably running over an unshielded PCIe lane, and it shows

Your Wi-Fi 7 router is probably in the worst spot in your home, and it's costing you hundreds in wasted speeds

Your Wi-Fi isn't slow because of bandwidth — it's because of airtime

Your switch's management VLAN is sitting on the same network as your smart plug, and that's a massive security problem

I moved one mesh node and my Wi-Fi got faster everywhere

Treating your ISP's router as the brain of your home network is the biggest mistake you can make

You're settling for the bare minimum.

I run my own DNS at home now, and Pi-hole isn't the one I'd recommend anymore

Moving everything to OPNSense.

I thought a 10GbE home networking upgrade was overkill, but it's the best upgrade I ever made

I'm here to eat humble pie and transfer data

This Netgear 8-port managed switch is down to $35, and it's one of the cheapest ways to organize a messy network

Get it while you can

Your router's auto channel selection is quietly tanking your Wi-Fi performance

This doesn't work how you expect it would

I don't expose my home server anymore: I let Tailscale do the scary part

Private by default, public by exception.

Your router's most questionable setting is probably still enabled, exposing your Wi-Fi to hackers

Disable Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) even before reading this article

4 things I wish someone told me before I invested $200 into a mesh Wi-Fi system

They're not as perfect as they appear.

I ditched Plex, Google Photos, and iCloud for self-hosted alternatives, and Pangolin made it actually work

The subscriptions were solving the wrong problem.

I gave my home lab self-healing powers using Prometheus, Grafana, and one free monitoring stack

From zero to hero.

I replaced Pi-hole with Unbound for a week, and the privacy upgrade wasn't the only win

Would I recommend replacing Pi-hole with Unbound?

10GbE networking is a trap, unless you're using it for this one thing

While it is fun, your NAS probably doesn't need 10-gig, unless you're using it for this one productivity task

Some of the best-selling Cat6 Ethernet cables are fake, and you can't legally run them in your walls

Not all Cat6 cabling is created equal, and running it in your home could have consequences

I turned a spare USB drive and Wi‑Fi router into shared storage, no NAS required

Create a NAS on the cheap.

Android Auto got better when I stopped treating it like a second phone screen

It's here for the long haul.

I added a second network port to my home server, and it fixed more than transfer speeds

Not everything is about speed

IPv8 looked like a real plan to fix the internet, but it was one man, an AI chatbot, and a GoFundMe page

We tracked down the author behind that IETF IPv8 draft.

I used an old router as a dedicated smart home network, and it solved two problems at once

Simpler setup beats the enterprise one.

Your mesh nodes are talking over Wi-Fi when they could be wired, and it's killing your speed

A simple Ethernet cable between your nodes and the router is the way to go

One DNS tool did what two containers couldn't, and I'm not going back to Pi-hole

The simpler stack was there all along. I didn't upgrade, I removed.