👋🏻 I went down another rabbit hole.

My wife and I moved into a new place a few months ago and we’ve been spending a lot of time fixing and improving things: electrical, plumbing, landscaping, and so forth. Our to-do list is probably a hundred items long but we’ve miraculously gotten through most of it. We largely DIYed and learned on the fly. I plan to write more about what we did… eventually.

The latest rabbit hole has been my home networking & servers. One of my pre-requisites for this new place was fiber internet, which actually ruled out a lot of homes. I ended up with AT&T 5-gigabit fiber for $225/month. Google Fiber might be available soon and offers a 8-gigabit plan for only $150/month, but in the meantime, this is the best home networking stack I’ve ever had:

• Fiber (5G)
• ➡️ WAS-110 SFP+ module (AT&T equipment bypass)
• ➡️ UDM-Pro
• ➡️ SFP+ DAC (10G)
• ➡️ 12-port switch with 10G backhaul into every room
• 3x eero Max 7 running purely as wireless APs

I currently have two servers running at home: a custom-built Unraid NAS and a M4 Mac Mini. I’ll write about the NAS in a separate post, but the Mac Mini is one of my favorite Apple devices in recent memory. I got the base model with 10G ethernet - an insane performance/$ value. I’ve deployed numerous homelab services like Scrypted NVR, Plex, pi-hole, Homebridge, caddy on it and yet it’s cold to the touch with no fan noise.

caddy was my most recent discovery - it’s a simple web server written in Go and supports everything including auto HTTPS. In just 30 minutes, I migrated over all of my personal websites (including this one!) and set it up as a reverse proxy for all my internal services. Since I was already messing with things, I took the opportunity to switch this site to Hugo, a modern framework without all the overhead of traditional CMS systems. It’s insane how easy everything is on the web these days.

Anyways, back to tinkering.