It has been another busy month for us at The Homelabber. Between work, watching spooky movies and tinkering with our homelabs, we have been working on a few things.

Configuring WAN Failover on pfSense

After having a second Internet line installed back in September, Blag has been experimenting with configuring pfSense to use the second line as a failover connection. This was put on hold shortly due to a bug in pfSense, which has now been fixed. Subsequently, the guide on pfSense WAN failover is out!

James’ homelab’s first failing hard drive

James released an article on his first failing drive and how it might not actually be so dire. As of writing this, the drive is still ticking along.

Unraid Homelab Monitoring

The Unraid monitoring piece is still in the works, with the first installment of the series almost done. There has been a lot of work going into fine-tuning existing alerts and reducing noise.

Raspberry Pi 5

The Raspberry Pi 5 launched in October. We are finally getting our hands on one! Offering some welcomed performance gains over its predecessor, we wonder how far we can push it in a homelab environment. James is working on a fun piece to see just how much of his homelab he can reasonably run on this relatively low-cost device.

Implementing Snort on pfSense

A good security posture adapts and leverages a multi-layer approach. Blag has been implementing intrusion detection and prevention using Snort. After initially running Snort in detection mode to identify and suppress false positives. He has started rolling out block mode as the next stage of testing.

Snort is an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) that uses a variety of rules to inspect network traffic to generate alerts that are ultimately ban harmful traffic.

This will be a source of future content as we build up more experience and generate results.