I built a rack out of wood in 2004 — it was at home, and a lab, of sorts, so I guess that makes it a homelab 🙂

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at 20 years’ worth of homelabbing ❤️

While doing some WireGuard testing between local peers; I noticed weird performance issues on my virtual Mikrotik router. This lead me down a rabbit hole of testing the layer 3 throughput on my virtual CHR.

The bitrate started at close to 10 Gbits/s, but then dropped to 3-4 — only in one direction 🤷 Time to investigate…

My homelab rack has been running as is for a while now — it’s time for a few new projects.

I’m rearranging stuff to better utilize the space, looking into 25 Gbit networking, and putting a HP Z440 server to good use 🙂

I stumbled onto NextDNS recently — it’s like a cloud hosted Pi-hole. I tried it for a few days, but this post isn’t about that.

Reading about the different block lists in NextDNS, and digging deeper into DNS ad blocking gave me motivation to change my current setup — and that is what this post is about 🙂

Searching for a tool to keep track of IP addresses; I stumbled onto Netbox — and was blown away by what it could do 🤯 I could put everything there: racks, servers, patch panels, Wi-Fi access points, power distribution, network runs. Everything!