Lab Notes

Networking Basics #8: Firewalls and Rate Limiting, From the Router Down to 12 Lookups an Hour

Networking Basics #4: Reverse Proxies — One nginx Front Door for a Dozen Containers

Learn how to use a single nginx instance as a reverse proxy to route traffic to multiple Docker containers.

Networking Basics #2: DNS — How breadtoasting.com Actually Resolves

Dive into the intricacies of DNS with `breadtoasting.com` as a real-world example. Learn about record types, TTLs, and how Cloudflare enhances privacy.

Hardware Fundamentals for Homelabbers: RAM Types, CPU vs GPU vs DPU, and Unified Memory

Learn the basics of hardware selection for your homelab, focusing on RAM types, CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, and unified memory.

Networking Basics #10: Monitoring and Health Checks — Knowing It's Down Before a Customer Does

How BreadLab knows a service is down before anyone tells us: health endpoints, caching, and honest status.

Networking Basics #9: Latency vs Bandwidth — Why Game Servers Care About Milliseconds

Learn about the critical difference between bandwidth and latency in your home lab, especially for game hosting.

Networking Basics #7: TLS and HTTPS — What the Padlock Does for breadtoasting.com

Learn about TLS/HTTPS, from encryption to authentication, and how it's implemented on my homelab setup.

Networking Basics #6: Cloudflare Tunnels vs Open Ports (and the Two-Cloudflared 502 Mystery)

Discover why Breadtoasting.com uses Cloudflare tunnels instead of opening inbound ports, and how a misconfiguration led to intermittent errors.

Networking Basics #5: Docker Networking — Why Containers Talk to Each Other by Name

Learn how containers in a user-defined bridge network can communicate using names, and why this setup is more secure than hardcoding IP addresses.

Networking Basics #3: NAT and Port Forwarding — How Game Servers Survive Behind a Home Router

Learn how Network Address Translation (NAT) and port forwarding enable game servers to operate behind a home router's single public IP address.

Networking Basics #1: IP Addresses and Subnets, via BreadLab's 192.168.1.0/24

Dive into the basics of IP addressing and subnets using real-world examples from my homelab setup.

Building a Customer Order Tracker on the Gooten API (Without Leaking the Key)

Created an internal endpoint to securely check order statuses from our homelab, ensuring sensitive customer information stays safe.

Running a Minecraft Server on Real Hardware with AMP

A walkthrough of deploying a Minecraft Java server using CubeCoders AMP — covering installation, a hardware migration driven by I/O contention on shared NAS storage, and DNS configuration via Cloudflare to keep the home IP private.