IoT Graphic

How to Add VLAN Segmentation for HomeKit IoT Devices with Unifi

IoT Overview The smart world of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices is ever growing. From everyday lightbulbs to the sprinkler out front, just about every household appliance and utility has a smart-counterpart. For example, my smart home is fully Apple HomeKit compatible and consists of a Hue bridge with lightbulbs, Lutron Caseta smart dimmers/switches, Eve Aqua outdoor water hose control, iSmartGate garage door opener, Schlage deadbolt, Eve motion sensor, Sonos speakers throughout the house, a Vocolinc oil diffuser, Vocolionc power strip, a couple iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaners, some Vocolinc pluggable outlets, an Ecobee thermostat to replace each analog thermostat in the house, and a Unifi G4 Doorbell (the doorbell is not technically compatible with HomeKit, but I added support with a third-party tool known as “Homebridge”)....

April 9, 2021 · 8 min · Robert D. White
Image of Lock

How to Harden Your Network Security for Your In-Home Web Hosting

Overview The purpose of this post is to provide some tips to address some network security concerns when hosting an externally-facing web server from a device within your home network. For this post, I will be using Unifi networking gear. My screenshots will be of the Unifi controller on my Unifi Dream Machine Pro (UDMP), but I will do my best to overview the concepts so you can replicate with your own networking gear....

April 6, 2021 · 8 min · Robert D. White
pfSense, Unifi, & PIA Graphic

How to Use pfSense and Unifi to Anonymize and Encrypt VLAN Tagged Traffic

This post aims to show you how to use pfSense within a Unifi network behind a Unifi Gateway [in my case, the gateway is the Unifi Dream Machine Pro (hereafter referred to as UDMP)]. I will explain my current network configuration including applicable subnets, VLANs, and wireless SSIDs needed to make this setup successful. The end goal is to be able to add a client on my Unifi network to a particular VLAN either by joining this client wirelessly to a particular SSID or by tagging the client’s physical port to that VLAN....

April 5, 2021 · 9 min · Robert D. White
Docker, Wordpress, & Traefik

Host Your Own Free Wordpress Site with Traefik and Docker

Update 03/20/2022: I no longer host my site with Traefik, and my site is no longer built on WordPress. I now host my site internally using an Nginx proxy hosted in Docker. My site is built with Hugo. Learn more about my transition from WordPress to Hugo on my post here: Migrating from WordPress to Hugo My first post will, appropriately, show you how to build your own self-hosted Wordpress site utilizing Docker (just like this site)!...

April 2, 2021 · 11 min · Robert D. White