A not so complete guide on building a home server

This is a curated, opinionated guide to building a full-stack home server from hardware to application. The goal is to provide a linux environment that can manage VMs, containers and microvms with ease. As a platform, it allows the enthusiasts to experiment and try out new stuff such as PCI passthrough, AWS Site-to-Site VPN and more.

<span title='2021-08-21 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>August 21, 2021</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;9 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;David Xiao

Dynamic DNS on Cloudflare in 5 Minutes

You will need the following to get dynamic DNS working on Cloudflare: Cloudflare as your DNS provider. Migrating from your current DNS provider over to Cloudflare is easy and free whether you are using Godaddy, Namecheap or another one. Get API token set up on Cloudflare. Install cloudflare-cli. Cloudflare API token Cloudflare Token is preferred way over API key as token enables added security by allowing to specify access level with permissions and resources....

<span title='2020-06-10 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>June 10, 2020</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;1 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;David Xiao

Hosting Multiple Apps With Nginx Rewrite Rules

A reverse proxy such as Nginx will come in handy if you need to host multiple apps on a single domain. Here’s a 5-minute how-to.

<span title='2020-06-10 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>June 10, 2020</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;1 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;David Xiao

Integrating a Self-Hosting Commenting System to Your Site

If you are looking for guidance on integrating an open-source commenting system such as Remark42 to your site, here is how I did it.

<span title='2020-06-09 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>June 9, 2020</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;4 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;David Xiao

Setting Up a Mailgun Relay With Postfix

Set up a Postfix server on local network that relays outgoing emails through Mailgun SMTP.

<span title='2020-06-06 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>June 6, 2020</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;4 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;David Xiao