Server on Nerd things and more...

Headscale + SWAG

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:21:47 -0600

In a previous post: Headscale, how to self-host tailscale, I explained how to configure headscale in server; now it is outdated. At that time the only way to install it was using the .deb or binary file, but now we can use a simpler method. This time we will focus on: Docker, headscale and SWAG.

SWAG (Secure Web Application Gateway) sets up an Nginx reverse proxy with built-in cerbot for SSL certificates using Let's Encrypt. I already wrote a litter bit about it here.

Reverse proxy, no more 192.168.1.25:8080

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 13:19:47 -0600

From Wikipedia;

A proxy server that appears to any client to be an ordinary web server, but in reality merely acts as an intermediary that forwards the client's requests to one or more ordinary web servers.

In other words, it is like a man in the middle that redirects traffic. The most common case is for visiting severs for a name or fully qualified domain name (FQDN), like www.enchilada.lan, instead of the ip of the server (e.g. 192.168.1.25).

Folder share from Proxmox to LXC, for Samba

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 14:33:20 -0600

Since I installed Proxmox for my small home server, I struggled a bit with nas shares due to user ownership and permissions, but after searching a bit I encountered a tutorial (I can remember where) to do it easily. So, before I forget it I will write here how I nailed it.

It works to share a mountpoint from Proxmox to the LXCs, so if you have an ssd/hdd in that directory, it will share the whole disk.

Home-Assistant, being lazy at home

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 12:52:44 -0600

Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.

HomeAssistant is basically an OS (?) where you can add all the IoT devices (e.g. smart switches, cameras, smart led lights, sensors, TVs, etc.) of your home, to be controlled locally from a friendly UI, with ability to create automations to be executed at specific times and/or events. I will just cover the basics.

DuckDNS, forget your ip

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 20:51:55 -0600

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.

Netdata, real-time server monitoring

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 13:06:12 -0500

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.