https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/series/home-lab/Recent content in Home Lab on Bill's Bloghttps://billalrehmani.pages.dev/images/eft-bg.jpghttps://billalrehmani.pages.dev/images/eft-bg.jpgHugoen-AUSat, 11 Jul 2026 22:30:00 +1000https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/wireguard-pfsense-nested-firewall/Sat, 11 Jul 2026 22:30:00 +1000https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/wireguard-pfsense-nested-firewall/I already run Tailscale, but I wanted to build a VPN into my lab from scratch — raw WireGuard on pfSense, reaching it from my phone on mobile data. Getting the tunnel up was the easy part. Then came four separate silent failures, each producing the identical 'won't load' symptom for a completely different reason, at a completely different layer.https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/claude-code-mcp-hub-tailscale/Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:55:00 +1000https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/claude-code-mcp-hub-tailscale/Linking two independent Claude Code agents — a home-lab VM and a roaming laptop — through a custom MCP server over a Tailscale mesh, so the laptop can push notes to a central hub from any network without opening a single inbound port.https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/prometheus-grafana-observability-stack/Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:26:00 +1000https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/prometheus-grafana-observability-stack/The dashboard layer under the LaMetric glance: Prometheus scraping my Debian VM and pfSense firewall, Grafana turning it into real graphs with history — all on one isolated VM, bound to localhost, reusing the SNMP work from the last project.https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/implementing-lametric-time-to-network-part-2/Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:20:00 +1000https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/implementing-lametric-time-to-network-part-2/Adding real WAN throughput to the LaMetric display by polling pfSense over SNMP — turning 'a VM's stats' into 'my network's stats', with the counter that proves it works.https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/implementing-lametric-time-to-network/Sun, 05 Jul 2026 21:30:00 +1000https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/implementing-lametric-time-to-network/Piping live home-lab stats to a LaMetric Time over MQTT — bridging two deliberately-isolated networks through a cloud broker without opening a single inbound port.https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/pfsense-lab-recovery-and-hardening/Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:46:00 +1000https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/pfsense-lab-recovery-and-hardening/A Windows update silently re-enabled the hypervisor and killed my VMware lab's networking. The diagnosis, the fix, and the pfSense rebuild — bridged WAN plus egress rules — that came out of it.