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.
Leave a Reply