OpenWrt

Previously, we spoke of how easy is to set a mesh network between your devices with tailscale. Usually, that will work for most of the people, but in the view that you are using a third party server that might log your activity you would probably want to avoid that and maybe self host the mesh management (there are huge communities that like to selfhost this kind of services of their homelab). Luckily, headscale exist as An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server. It has support for most of the OS's ...

Duck DNS is a free service which will point a DNS (sub domains of duckdns.org) to an IP of your choice. In other words, you can create: yourverycoolandawesomewebsitethatnooneknowsabout.duckdns.org that will point to the ip of your homelab or VPS. Why? Well, I already wrote about how to access remotely to your homelab using the Tor network. Also how it can be simplified using Tailscale and to avoid sending data to tailscale servers you could use headscale to selfhost. ...

If you have a server, you know it is useful to have information of your server to troubleshoot and detect problems or bad configurations, usage of the CPU, ram, network and health of the HDD. There are plenty of options: monit, monitorix, munin, Netdata and Grafana (coupled with one data collector like: collectd, influxdb, Graphite or Prometheus) Despite Grafana is one of the most popular choices, I decided to use Netdata, since it is pre-configured out of the box and it does both collect data and create graphs displayed through a http server. It is lightweight that will only require 1% CPU usage and around 12 MiB of RAM (at least in my OpenWrt router). Munin is my second choice, but decided to go with Netdata just because it just worked fine after install without too much hassle to configure. ...

Recently I wrote about how to use the Tor network as a free VPN and how to make as secure as possible in the Tor a hidden friend to SSH your home network entry. However, I recommended to use WireGuard to connect securely and fast to your home network if you could set port forwarding on your router and leave Tor as a last option, since it is slow and its main goal is to serve as a circumvent censorship tool rather than a VPN. ...

You might had heard of the Dark web or the Deep web, well the first one is just a small part of the latter. The Dark web is populated with darknets which is an overlay network within the Internet that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization. These darknets can be small peer-to-peer networks or large as the I2P Anonymous Network, Freenet and the most popular Tor Project. In this case, we will focus in the Tor network and how to use it to connect to your home network for remote control. ...

AdGuard Home is a… Privacy protection center for you and your devices Free and open source, powerful network-wide ads & trackers blocking DNS server. It has a windows, Mac, Android and iOS app. Also a web extension, it is also offering a DNS service, VPN service and a package for OpenWrt. We will focus on the latter, I wrote briefly about it the Ad Blocking, simple & fast entry. This post is based on this forum entry. The only difference is that it will be installed in an external HDD connected to the OpenWrt router. ...

The OpenWrt Project is a Linux operating system targeting embedded devices. Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management. This frees you from the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to customize the device through the use of packages to suit any application(…) Yeeeah baby! good soup! Have you ever hated your wireless router so much that you wanted to smash it to the wall because it is just a piece of useless shit? ...

We all hate ads. According to Wikipedia, Ad blocking or ad filtering is a software capability for blocking or altering online advertising in a web browser, an application or a network. This may be done using browser extensions or other methods. So you have choices I am not going to detail but give the practical and useful information about the fastest and easiest way to block ads Browser extensions You need, always, no matter what, a web browser ad block extension. It will, of course, block ads only for the web browser. Main alternatives are: ...