When I rebuilt my smart home in , I wanted everything running locally with no cloud dependency. After 90 days of testing 7 different hardware setups across two homes, I can tell you that picking the best hardware for running Zigbee2MQTT and Mosquitto makes the difference between a flaky setup and a rock-solid one. Zigbee2MQTT … Read more
When my Zigbee network crossed 60 devices last year, my old CC2531 dongle buckled under the load. Pairing took minutes, motion sensors stopped responding, and the whole mesh turned flaky overnight. That experience sent me down a rabbit hole: testing six of the most popular Zigbee2MQTT coordinators on real large meshes with 100+ devices. I … Read more
Home Assistant turns your Raspberry Pi into a powerful smart home hub that controls lights, sensors, cameras, and hundreds of other devices from one interface. Running it on the default SD card works fine for a while, but that flash storage wears out fast under 24/7 use. That is exactly why so many people end … Read more
I have spent the better part of three years running Orange Pi and Radxa boards for home servers, mini NAS setups, and random weekend projects. Along the way I have learned that the hardest part is rarely the hardware. The real headache is software. When official OS images are outdated, abandoned, or simply never existed … Read more
If you want to isolate IoT gear, run a guest Wi-Fi, or split work from play on the same physical network, learning how to set up VLANs on a managed switch with pfSense for network segmentation is one of the highest-leverage skills you can pick up. I built my own segmented home lab on pfSense … Read more
Every smart camera, voice assistant, and connected plug you add to your home network is another potential entry point for attackers. Most IoT devices ship with weak default credentials, rarely receive firmware updates, and phone home to servers you have no control over. Configuring firewall rules to isolate IoT devices on their own VLAN is … Read more
Setting up OPNsense with tagged VLANs and a Proxmox bridge is one of the cleanest ways to run a virtualized firewall in a homelab. It gives you a single physical network cable that carries multiple isolated segments for guests, IoT, lab workloads, and management traffic. In this guide I walk through the full configuration: hardware … Read more
If you’ve ever set up a Tailscale subnet router, watched the route appear in the admin console, and then watched your traffic vanish into a black hole, you’ve probably hit one of the most common pain points in the Tailscale community: missing static return routes. The route advertises, the client says it’s there, and yet … Read more
A Tailscale exit node is a device on your tailnet that routes 100% of your internet traffic through its connection, so any device you connect from appears to be on the exit node’s network. In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to configure a Tailscale exit node for full-tunnel VPN access, from choosing the … Read more
I set up WireGuard on a small Linux server in my home network so I could reach my NAS, security cameras, and home lab from anywhere. The first attempt took me a frustrating weekend, mostly because I did not understand how AllowedIPs, NAT, and IP forwarding fit together. This guide is the one I wish … Read more