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Phil Vishnevsky

Writing

19 posts on homelabs, networking, tooling, and whatever I broke recently.

Homelab & networking

series · 5

Five posts that build on each other, from what a VPN actually is up to a reverse proxy fronting the whole rack. Start at the top.

01 What Is a VPN? What It Hides, and From Whom A VPN moves the point where your traffic joins the internet. That is the whole trick, and it explains most of what the ads get wrong. 18 min read
02 Tailscale Explained: A Mesh VPN With No Open Ports How Tailscale gets two machines talking directly through a router that should not allow it, and what it falls back to when NAT wins. 24 min read
03 Self‑Hosting With Tailscale: Secure Access Without Open Ports Running services at home and reaching them from anywhere, without forwarding a single port. 25 min read
04 SSO for Self-Hosted Apps: One Login for the Whole Rack Pocket ID, Tinyauth, and a reverse proxy, wired so every service behind them takes the same login. 20 min read
05 Reverse Proxy for a Homelab: Caddy and Automatic HTTPS Putting Caddy in front of a rack of services: real certificates on internal domains, and no port numbers in any URL. 22 min read

Posts

2

Data mining coursework

archive · 12

Weekly write-ups from an intro data mining course — the pipeline, classification, regression, clustering, and a midterm study guide.