Caddy is a tool I use for home lab HTTPS management. However, the tool is not bulletproof. It’s not a simple GUI tool to add services and forget. One such problem Caddy can introduce with HTTPS is during the challenge to obtain a certificate. Because the certificate has to be renewed periodically, even if it succeeded at one point, it may fail or give out an error tomorrow.
Tagged Network
How to Band-aid Fix Seerr “Movie Not Found” Error
My Seerr started acting up after the migration. In the web UI, it threw “Movie Not Found” errors — not on everything, but, evidently, only on some of the movies in the library and some of the entries in trending. Both LAN and WAN were working fine. The errors weren’t persistent. They came and went, and the number of films affected kept changing.
How to Scan Local Network for Reserved IP
While routers are becoming ‘smarter’ day by day, some of the rather basic features are pushed back to the “Professional” department. One such feature is LAN management, specifically, static IP reservation. Single-source-of-truth dictates one authority for IP assignment — routers could be that authority. However, practically speaking, none of the consumer-level routers I’ve encountered have managed to ship a proper static IP management. Hence per-device static IP.
App to Discover IP Addresses for Proxy Switchers
If you are using a rule-based proxy switcher, checking IP addresses for each proxy could easily get out of hand. It is possible to stop the auto-routing and force the connection for manual testing, but that is not what I wanted to do with a browser extension.
How to Auto-Switch Proxies on iOS using PAC
This one is mostly for documentation and proof of concept. I was able to get it to work, but it was never reliable enough. The iOS feature itself does work. But even at the basic home lab level, it doesn’t have any interface to speak of. For instance, I want to know if traffic is actually going through the designated proxy, but there is no notification of any kind. For day-to-day operation, I don’t think it fits the bill.
App to DDNS with API for Local HTTPS Certificate
I’m still in the process of writing up the Caddy + DuckDNS post, but I thought to make a separate post anyway what DDNS is and why I am writing about DuckDNS for the particular home lab setup. DDNS is often used for home or small office environment, when the IP address to the said network is not fixed. ISP usually ask extra for fixed IP address. DDNS effectively keeps the record of your machine’s public IP, thereby connecting to the said DDNS domain would lead back to home.
How to Make mDNS Discoverable on Tailscale
One thing I’ve learned the hard way while I was tinkering with VPN long ago — don’t use bonjour or .local addresses over VPN. Most of the times .local addresses do not resolve over VPN, and trying to make it happen is often not worth the effort. In my case, with some Pis and NAS, I had made sure they would manually pick an IP addresses that would be out of DHCP range. It’s a story for another time, but there are home routers with broken DHCP.
App to Replace Built-in VPN Server on Router
I suppose it needs some context to explain what even is a “VPN server on a router” for home and small offices. If you have a home lab, DIY projects, or even a simple NAS, chances are, you don’t want to have them all exposed to the internet. Prudence dictates every device should have its security, especially with the coming days of IPv6; however, many security advices I read online and still abide by always recommend keeping them behind the locked door — the router. A VPN server, therefore, lets users connect to LAN, just like a VPN in a…
How to Change tmux Scroll Buffer (History)
It’s funny how I discover the settings I would have wanted to change before I run a massive migration script. This is a story of tmux, yet again. tmux is definitely a better tool to have when the work is done remotely over Terminal. The only downside of it all, aside from being old-fashioned CLI, has to be what I took it for granted on local Terminal sessions — history. tmux has limited history or scroll buffer.
How to Add Mouse and Scroll Shortcut for tmux
While tmux is a wonderful tool on its own, for mere mortals like myself, I jump back and forth between GUI and CLI. At least, that’s the impression I am getting from tmux why I am not getting 100% out of it. The shortcuts, quite frankly, are not intuitive for modern GUI users mind.
Netgear Orbi RBR50 Spiel
Orbi RBR50 has been EOL for a couple of years now, so as a “review”, this post will be outdated the moment it is published. But I thought to share some of my experiences, some positives, and some negatives in using and setting up mesh routers for the first time then upgrading to another one. I wouldn’t go into details on what is my latest choice of routers, but it isn’t from Netgear — partly due to its pricing and product design.
How to Troubleshoot Steam Synchronization Issues
This isn’t the solution that will fix all synchronizations on Steam platform. Instead, I decided to keep it as a documentation purpose, as most of the posts and articles I could find on the subject hardly touched on it. If you are seeing “Unable to sync” on the Steam client for all games, you are on the same boat as I was.
Ethernet, the Physical Champion of Nonphysical Mediums
More than a decade ago, I ran the ethernet ‘backbones’ for my home network: ones to connect the nodes, ones to connect workstations, and ones to connect media streaming devices. If I recall correctly, the fastest WiFi standard available at the time to be used to connect nodes-to-nodes, were either slightly slower or faster than the 1Gbps Cat 5E, which was already wired-in. I benignly thought cables would last long enough with little latencies; how incredibly wrong I was.
How To Band-Aid Fix mDNS not Resolving Over VPN
I’m calling it a band-aid fix, because this is technically not a “fix”. As far as I could find, it is technically not possible to use mDNS (Bonjour) over VPN. Only when the remote client is bridged through VPN mDNS packets can reach the client, but it causes its own havoc, especially less useful for home and small office environment as not all devices would support bridge mode. Apparently the problem itself, trying to reroute mDNS packets over VPN, is rather an obscure goal, and routers and its firmwares simply do not support such functionalities.
App to Test Internal Network Bandwidth
As I was upgrading to a new router this week, one of the things I immediately wanted to test was the existing ethernet cables and ports. As reliable as they are, cables and ports are also physical objects with lifespans. If cables running behind the walls are damaged, that’s a major headache; and if one of the cables running between switches is damaged, albeit minor, it’s still a headache to find out which.