Notes on software, systems, self-hosting, and whatever else I’m tinkering with.
I Analyzed 22 Million NPM Requests. Zero Were External Attacks.
This Reddit post made the rounds a while back. The author parsed 30 days of Nginx Proxy Manager logs and found 1.16 million attack requests out of 5.4 million total. WordPress scans, webshell probes, secrets hunting, Log4Shell attempts – the full catalog of internet background noise. It was a good read and made me wonder what my own logs looked like. My setup is different from theirs. I run OPNsense as my edge firewall with strict VLAN segmentation. The homelab lives on a dedicated VLAN behind the firewall. NPM routes traffic to about 26 services. Remote access is through Tailscale – no ports forwarded from the WAN. ...
Homelab
Here’s a breakdown of everything running in my homelab: hardware, network, virtualisation, storage, and services. The main reason I built all of this was to stop depending on big cloud providers and take back ownership of my own data. Too much of what I relied on day to day was sitting on someone else’s servers, subject to their pricing, their outages, and their terms. Having a fully functional lab that works even when the internet goes down is genuinely satisfying. There is something rewarding about knowing your photos, files, and media live on hardware you own and control. As a bonus it let me cut the cord on Google storage, iCloud, Netflix, and other streaming subscriptions without feeling like I was giving anything up. ...