Having a battery backup system (UPS) is essential for home servers hosting multiple services. But it’s not enough for the UPS to supply power for a few minutes: the critical part is that, in case of a prolonged outage, the entire system shuts down in a controlled and orderly manner. In this article I document how I deployed a solution based on NUT on Proxmox to achieve this. …
In this post I share a selection of cross-platform command-line tools that you can use interchangeably on PowerShell, CMD, WSL2, macOS and Linux. These are modern, fast and lightweight utilities that replace or greatly improve classic tools like ls, cd, find or even command history. They not only speed up everyday tasks, but also offer a more consistent user experience across systems. They don’t depend on specific shells like Bash or Zsh, and work the same whether you use PowerShell, Terminal, Alacritty, VSCode or any modern environment. As I discover new CLI utilities that fit this cross-platform, no-heavy-dependencies approach, I’ll keep adding them. …
Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It allows building fast, secure websites without the need for dynamic servers. It’s especially designed for developers, technical writers and anyone who prefers writing content in Markdown and publishing it quickly with a professional design. Perfect for maintaining my technical notes and personal documentation. It’s known for its compilation speed and for not requiring external dependencies like databases or complex template engines. Ideal for blogs, documentation, portfolios and corporate sites. …
Multicast DNS (mDNS) is a networking protocol designed to resolve hostnames to IP addresses within small networks, without the need for a local DNS server. It requires no configuration (zero-configuration) and uses the same programming interfaces, packet formats and operational semantics as unicast Domain Name System (DNS). It was designed to work as either a standalone protocol or alongside standard DNS servers. mDNS can work together with DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD), a complementary zero-configuration networking technique specified separately in RFC 6763. …
A couple of months ago I moved the DHCP and DNS services to my home Linux router and left the Pi-Hole 5 service on a separate virtual machine. Despite everything working perfectly, I hit a snag: troubleshooting from PiHole is complicated because all DNS queries are resolved by the router and PiHole sees nothing. So I decided to redesign the setup. In this post I describe how I install Pi-Hole 6 on my Linux router so it provides DNS, DHCP (with dnsmasq) and ad sinkholing. This involves undoing the native dnsmasq installation. …
In this post I describe the process of installing a “Bitwarden” server. I’ve been using their Cloud service for several years, but I’ve decided to go with an on-premise home installation. While researching I discover with surprise that I have two options, the first is to use the official Bitwarden self-hosted (which consumes quite a few resources and seems complex) or go with a lightweight Vaultwarden, a clone of the former, which apparently installs quickly and is simple. …