Self-Hosting on Thyago Seugling

Deploying a Zero-Trust Network with Tailscale and Nginx Proxy Manager

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For years, my home lab ran on a patchwork of port forwards, dynamic DNS, and good intentions. It worked — mostly — but every exposed port was a liability, and I knew it. This is the story of how I tore it all down and rebuilt on a zero-trust foundation.

Why Zero Trust?

The traditional model assumes that anything inside your network is safe. Zero trust flips that entirely: verify everything, trust nothing. Every request is authenticated, every connection is encrypted, and no service is reachable unless explicitly permitted.

The Art of the Minimal Docker Compose Stack

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve seen compose files that span three hundred lines, define seventeen networks, and require a dedicated README just to explain the environment variables. I’ve also written a few of them. That era is over. Every stack I deploy now follows a small set of principles that I’ve refined through a lot of painful rollbacks.

The Problem with Bloat

Configuration drift is silent and cumulative. A commented-out service here, an undocumented environment variable there — and six months later, no one (including you) knows what’s load-bearing and what’s vestigial. The compose file stops being documentation and becomes archaeology.

ZFS on Linux: Why I Made the Switch and Never Looked Back

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I lost data once. Not catastrophically — a single ext4 volume quietly developing bad sectors while I assumed everything was fine, because nothing was loudly failing. By the time I noticed, the damage was done. That experience sent me down a rabbit hole that ended at ZFS, and I haven’t looked at another filesystem for storage since.

Why ZFS?

Most filesystems trust that the data written to disk is the data you’ll read back. ZFS doesn’t. It checksums every block, every read, and every write. Silent data corruption — the kind that accumulates invisibly over years — is caught and, with redundancy, corrected automatically. For a home lab storing years of photos, documents, and media, this matters.