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This site is about my home network and the Linux server behind it: how I set them up, how I keep them secure, and what I learned along the way. The goal is that you can build the same thing at home.
What I’m running
Nothing exotic. Most of it is gear a lot of people already have:
- A UniFi gateway and access point. The gateway is the firewall between the zones. It also runs intrusion prevention and the VPN I use when I’m away.
- A Linux server (Ubuntu) that does most of the work: monitoring and alerts, logs, a password manager and a media server. It has its own firewall too.
- A NAS for storage and the server’s nightly backups. It lives in its own zone, so a problem on the home network doesn’t reach it directly.
- Zones instead of one flat network. Family devices, the NAS and my work laptop are kept apart, and each one only gets what it needs.
A few rules I try to stick to: nothing open to the internet unless I really need it, remote access only through the VPN, alerts that email me before someone notices a problem, and backups I’ve actually tested restoring.
How this site is organized
- Guides are step-by-step. Each one says what you need, walks through the setup one step at a time, shows how to test that it works, and how to undo it. I run every guide on a fresh Ubuntu machine before I publish it.
- Stories are about what happened: something I built, something that broke, what I’d do differently.
If you’re starting from zero, the guides are meant to be followed in order: network first, then the server, then monitoring, then the rest.