https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/tags/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-AUTue, 07 Jul 2026 21:50:00 +1000https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/hardening-debian-homelab-vm/Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:50:00 +1000https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/hardening-debian-homelab-vm/The VM is already isolated behind a pfSense firewall — so why harden it? Because two paths reach in without ever crossing pfSense. An honest audit of my own box, the fixes, and the sandbox gotcha that broke a service.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.https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/home-network-hardening-hwg2025/Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:10:00 +1000https://billalrehmani.pages.dev/posts/home-network-hardening-hwg2025/How I hardened and segmented my home network on an ISP-provided Wi-Fi 7 router — and the DNS gotcha that makes doing it properly harder than it should be.