Today’s photo perfectly sums up my day—buried in keyboards, monitors, and the endless cycle of setting up and tearing down configurations. I took on the task of revamping my home network, running Pi-hole and PiVPN on two Raspberry Pi’s, while an older N5015 NUC found new life as my storage controller and media server. It sounded like a great plan. The reality? Three installs later, I finally got everything working (mostly).
There’s a certain joy in self-hosting. It’s part challenge, part problem-solving, and part refusing to let technology win. Setting up Pi-hole was relatively smooth—network-wide ad-blocking in place, and everything humming along nicely. PiVPN, on the other hand, decided to put up a fight. Ports needed opening, configs needed tweaking, and there was that inevitable moment where I realized I’d locked myself out of my own network. Good times.
The NUC was the real wildcard. It’s an older machine but still has enough grunt to handle media streaming and storage duties. That is, once I got the right OS installed… after two false starts. But now, it’s all up and running, the network feels cleaner, and I have a VPN I can trust when I’m away.
So was it worth the hours of troubleshooting, reinstalling, and cursing at error messages? Absolutely. Because at the end of the day, it’s not just about getting things to work—it’s about learning something new, tweaking things to perfection, and knowing that I have a setup tailored exactly to what I need.
The photo? Just a reminder of where I spent most of my time—staring at screens, typing commands, and sipping a very necessary cup of tea.
#RaspberryPi #SelfHosting #PiVPN #PiHole #TechTinkering
