tutorials

Reverse proxies are powerful tools used typically to forward client traffic to a server. In contrast to a forward proxy, a reverse proxy sits in front of web servers or other servers and forwards client traffic to the appropriate server. In this post, I will show you how to easily setup a reverse proxy using Docker, forward the necessary ports to the reverse proxy, and configure the reverse proxy to forward traffic to various servers on your network....

A Little Background and Some Thoughts With today’s technology, we are constantly bombarded with High Energy Visible (HEV) blue light from our screens as well as inconsistent lighting throughout the day within our homes and workplaces. Like all mammalian species, we humans have our own circadian rhythms which occur naturally and are vitally important to our health and well-being. Rather than writing an essay on the importance of our natural circadian rhythms, check out the educational write-up from the NIH here....

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”)....

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....

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....