Cloudflare Access for my Homelab I decided to use Cloudflare to setup a Secure Web Gateway and establish some Zero Trust access for my homelab services. Cloudflare offers a great service called “Cloudflare Access”. Basically it leverages Cloudflare’s edge network to create secure web routing. Setting up this service is just a matter of running a simple daemon. Once configured you setup Cloudflare DNS to route traffic. Let’s discuss how I setup Cloudflare Access. Read more...

The Beginning So if you hadn’t heard of the idea of a “homelab”, let me give you the quick run down of what is a “homelab”. Basically, a homelab is a collection of technologies (hardware and software) that you install, maintain, and configure in your home. Imagine a datacenter in your home or an electronics lab can also be a homelab. At the heart of the homelab movement is the idea of tinkering and learning. Read more...

Hi there! Follow along with me in this video as I install Fog Server. To learn more about Fog Project check out there website https://fogproject.org/. The installation is done with a simple script that you download from the project website. For this example I used Cent OS which you can get at the website here https://centos.org. You can use a Debian based OS as well but I chose Cent OS. Read more...

Recently I wanted to access a Virtual Machine I had created on my desktop from my laptop. I had access to the desktop via SSH but I wanted access to the virtual machine. To make things more interesting I wanted to access the VM(virtual machine) via a graphical interface. So I figured out that I could use SSH to “port forward” the VNC connection from the desktop to my laptop. It’s actually very easy and only requires a few basic SSH commands. Read more...

New Year, New Setup Ubuntu 19.10 Desktop I began the new year by buying a new 500GB SSD. My laptop had 2 drives: a 32GB SSD was my /root drive and a 120GB SSD was /home partition. This served me just well but obviously I would run out of space quickly if I was working with virtual machines. With a new drive I had to make the decision to start from scratch or use backups. Read more...

I recently decided to move my Ubuntu installation from my laptop to my desktop without having to reinstall. So basically all I wanted to do is move the SSD (which had Ubuntu 19.10 installed) in my laptop to my desktop. This process is not hard at all but in my case it was a little more complicated. I wanted to do a dual boot on my desktop computer with 2 different hard drives. Read more...

I blogged before about switching from Firefox Focus to DuckDuckGo mobile. Now it’s been 3 weeks since I made the switch and I wanted to do a quick post about my experience. First, it’s going great. I really like the fact that a search widget is included. I replaced the Google search with DuckDuckGo and I find myself using it a lot more. Which is great because I really like using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. Read more...

Region One hosted a Cybersecurity Summit for 2019 in Edinburg, TX. The event was free and I signed up to attend. It was a great event that had many great presenters. The theme of the summit was Cybersecurity on a regional level. Here are some of the talks I attended and the takeaways I got from them. Reduce Your Cybersecurity Risk and Get Complaint with SB 820 – Develop Policy: use already established policies as blueprints – Items to invest in: Malware protection/Endpoint protection, Firewalls, IDS/IPS, Spam Filtering, Log Monitoring Read more...

I have been using Firefox Focus for about half a year now. I came to use because I was using Chrome and simply got paranoid of what stuff Google was collecting via Chrome. So I made the switch to Firefox on my PC and started using Firefox for Android. Now before I started using Firefox Focus I was using Brave Browser for Android. Brave Browser is a Chromium based browser that tauts privacy for the end user. Read more...

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho Since I have been reading “self-help” books my wife suggested I check out The Alchemist. Luckily she owned a copy, so I grabbed it from our bookshelf and stuffed it in my backpack. I gotta say that I really enjoyed this book. I can now see why so many people consider it a “self-help”, book. Here are a two of my favorite passages: My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer”, the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. Read more...