Homelab

Your NAS, your Docker containers, your VMs: none of it needs to touch the internet. Ever. That’s the first reason to run a WireGuard tunnel back into your house. Not privacy, just never opening a port publicly in the first place. WireGuard is the one door in, and once you’re through it, everything behaves like you’re on the LAN, because you are. The second reason is the one people actually think of when they hear “VPN”: tunneling home while you’re on somebody else’s network, hotel wifi, a coffee shop, your phone’s hotspot. Commercial VPNs solve that by routing you through their own servers, meaning you trust their business model instead of your own network. Point WireGuard at home instead and your traffic exits from your house. Looks like you’re at home, because you basically are. ...

The Aruba AP-325 (Model: APIN0325) is an enterprise-grade 802.11ac Wave 2 access point that routinely appears on the secondary market after corporate Wi-Fi refreshes. The hardware is excellent — fast radios, strong range, rock-solid stability — but there’s a catch. Most surplus AP-325 units are “Campus APs”, meaning they require an Aruba Mobility Controller to function. Without one, they’re effectively useless. The good news: the AP-325 (and other similar Aruba models) can be converted to Instant (IAP) mode, allowing it to run standalone or form a controller-less cluster with other Instant APs. Once converted, it behaves exactly like a native Instant AP — no licenses, no subscriptions, no controller. ...

Most home networks are still running 1 Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE), which caps out at a theoretical 125 MB/s. That’s a real bottleneck when you’re working with high-resolution video, large game libraries, or a home lab with a NAS. The good news: you don’t need an enterprise budget to fix it. This guide shows how to get a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) network running for under $300 using a few key pieces of affordable hardware. ...