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Doing this deep dive into the home lab computer hobby has really challenged my research, critical thinking, and troubleshooting skills. I am also grinding away the surface rust. In the process of my research, I vaguely remembered that proxying has been used as a technique to avoid the problems of hairpinning and NAT. I am not really in an easy situation where I can just move things into a DMZ network and resolving IPs internally hasn’t completely solved my problems with email. Anyhow, I read about TCP streaming through NGINX and I thought maybe it just might work.

Thus, I installed the streaming module and configured a TCP streaming proxy for ports 25, 143, 587, and 993. It turns out that this was so successful and so much simpler than worrying about correctly configuring source and destination NAT to do everything so precisely. With just the simple TCP proxy in place, all I had to do was to source NAT everything through a simple rule and my email problems are elegantly solved.

I am learning a lot of things I didn’t know and I am seeing some gaps in my knowledge that research will have to fill so that I can continue to write the book that I am in the process of planning: Grokking the Home Lab: Learning Through Building Real Systems. I think it is about time someone wrote a book for the new home lab hobbyist. At least I know I am going to leave out some material on network address translation hairpinning – because fsck that! There’s a lot easier ways to go about solving some of the problems introduced by IP address sharing.

While the challenges can be, at times, frustrating, I am enjoying the journey. I need to sit down and find a good time to write and document all this. I need a format that works for me and I have yet to find one. My therapist recommended letters and that did not work so well. I am thinking of setting up another blog dedicated strictly to IT whereas this one is more of my mental health coping skill and life strategy. It would be somewhat confusing for readers so I bought a domain called www.tcpipguy.com. I think that will be the name for my blog. I might add a the to it. Maybe building the book out of timely blog entries that are related to home labbing is the right approach.

I am very tired and going to need a couple of days off. Fortunately for me, I will have Thursday and Friday off. It’s not quite enough time but better than nothing at all. I guess I am taking what I can get. That much said, I am learning to do what benefits me the most and not necessarily what helps my employer. I am unlearning being a “people pleaser” and it’s hard when I was raised that way.

I am working a split shift today for a total of 12 hours. It’s not going to be easy but it will be completely doable. During the time period that I have off – between 11am and 4pm – I will hang out at the library and hopefully accomplish something of note. I want to try and make some headway on my book with the working title, Grokking The Home Lab: Learning Through Building Real Systems. I had some material written but it wasn’t in the style recommended to me and hence it was scattered and I ended up scrapping it.

When I go to the library this morning into the afternoon, my operative plan is to write this book in a series of letters to a, “Dear Davoy” style. Nan, my therapist, recommended this approach as a method to reduce writer’s block. She assumed that it would work for fiction and non-fiction alike and I don’t see how this won’t work. Right now I cannot concentrate much and that’s because I have not fully woken up yet. Once I do though, I want to be ready.

I guess that doing this in a series of letters will make it so that it will be easy to write out of order and from a stream of consciousness. Oftentimes, this is the way I think best. I can always go back and organize the material at a later point. I can always do the edits at the same time. Since both DNS and IP addressing is very important and I’v been hard at it. So while both concepts are fresh in my mind it is time to put the writing efforts in.

I am a bit late to the blogging game today and it was mostly because I am just so damn tired. When this week is said and done, I will have had close to 60 working hours. To top it off, 28 hours will be paid at time and a half. 8 for working a holiday and the remaining 20 for straight over time. It will all help very much but it’s going to leave absolutely smoked. I am again reminded of how much I hate America. America is a country where we give assistance to millionaires and billionaires while the regular working class gets nothing except for hardship.

I am ready to go home and hit the hay because I am so tired. Fortunately, this shift is flying by and I only have two hours left. Then I get to come in and work from 7a-11a tomorrow. That won’t be bad. What’s going to suck will be Tuesday and Wednesday where I will be working 12 hour days. I guess it’s going to be nice to have Thursday and Friday off before the fun begins next week.

I am going to make another attempt at writing a fun information technology book. This time I have a much better idea for the intended target audience. Surprisingly, my therapist helped narrow down the audience to the intermediate computer user who is fascinated about how computers and networks operate and wants to learn more; take it to the next level. In my latest thinking, my ideal reader will want to balance learning by doing with grokking the theory behind it as well. So I may sit down to figure something fun out this weekend when I am at work

I am planning on enjoying today’s day off to its fullest possible. Yesterday, I was so tired that I was falling asleep on the job. I will also have Friday off too and it will feel good. In an ideal world I’d rack up enough paid vacation and just relax. This is going to be a short article as I have a lot to do.

I’m somewhat frustrated that my skill set in computing seems to have atrophied. I’m struggling and making rookie mistakes. On the flip side it is good that I am recognizing this and I do need to slow down and plan better; step away when my frustrations start to get too high.

I’m finding myself looking forward to work today. It’s easy and I earn okay money. Things could be better, and yet, they could be a whole lot worse. I do need to honor my promise to Denisse to help her study and I am doing that first thing when I get home.

I think while I sit in the dock office this morning I will try to get Let’s Encrypt certificates working so I can stand up my private cloud and have it secure. I am planning on hiding it behind a VPN because I don’t want it externally exposed.

I decided to get a lot of IT work done this weekend. One of my major goals was to get my lab systems on to a virtual network. The virtual network uses NAT for outbound connectivity but does allow some things inbound. I had to do this the manual way and it’s been a challenge. One of the things that makes Linux and BSD so powerful are their networking tool set. With the pretty much stock install, you can set up an entire virtual network within a host. If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves, there are some very cool things to do.

The first thing I did was create a virtual network with a bridge on my server called virbr10. The virbr10 has a dummy interface called virbr10-dummy. The dummy interface is just to keep the bridge in an up state while the virtual machines load on boot. It’s an important thing to do so that the boot time is faster.

This consolidation is ultimately a good thing but taking a lot longer than I had planned. I am still wrestling with getting my Mastodon instance moved but that’s okay. I know Mastodon can be really finicky. It’s not tolerant of stupid/arrogant sysadmins. 😆

I’m feeling every bit my age and it is partly my fault for not thinking to bring my afternoon dose of Gabapentin. It was poor planning because I worked a standing shift and I am a Type 2 Diabetic. Well at least I’m on the bus home. Sadly, I have not heard from Securitas yet. I was really hoping to hear from them and pick up a new security job as the company I work for now is dead end. I want to be done with them. The sooner the better.

In more positive news, my home computer lab is working well now. I have a virtualized OPNsense router that outperforms the piece of rubbish supplied by Verizon. The one thing I have not been able to get going is WireGuard on the router. For now, I spun up a container to power WireGuard. I also spun up another container for Mastodon. I have to see what other services I can host.

I am currently using the 169.254.0.0/16 but I broke it down into a single 169.254.0.0/29 for my home use but that won’t work. I was planning on using that block as tunnel endpoint addresses for the WAN I’m building. I need to rethink this some. For now, it’s okay but it won’t be for much longer. I’m building this WAN in the name of learning.

I am in the phase where I am starting to consider technology and architecture stacks for my business. Below is some of my brainstorming on the subject matter. I did get myself set up with a VoIP line and pretty cool number in my area code, 302. Obviously I am not sharing the number until I am fully ready to go. I don’t need the spam and robocalling just yet.

I think I have the rest of my technology stack worked out. The underlying operating system will be AlmaLinux 10. Since I am going to be small, the architecture can remain very simple. I’ll have two virtual servers, one to power my internal workflow and the other strictly for the website and e-commerce. I don’t expect to do a large volume on it as I will only be offering four services, so for now, simplicity is key.

So the entire stack for the website and e-commerce platform will be LEMP or Linux, eNGINX, MariaDB, and PHP with Valkey. For my internal processes, I will most likely go the route of LAMP or Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP with Valkey. This will be robust enough for my needs. Again, I want to “Keep It Simple Stupid.” The key will be getting services restored quickly when they go down. I will continue to use Linux on the desktop.