Local DNS
Austin Lane
I watched a few videos on Bind9 and managed to get a simple local DNS server up and running with some doing. The trickiest part was the syntax for forwarding to PiHole on another port and then setting up the wildcard so for now on any coffeesec.com subdomain goes to my Nginx Web Proxy without having to make a manual entry in PiHole every single time.
This is about as much as I’ll need the Bind9 server for. I still kind of want Unbound running on the other end to cache requests without going through Google or anyone else, but as soon as I tried to mess with it I couldn’t get it back up and just decided to wipe it out for now.
I’m running Bind9+PiHole in sequence, one pair on each box, so that potentially one could go down and the network could still function. I need to figure out a backup scheme for all of these docker volumes, though, so I could easily restore the setup if needed.
Now I have my eyes on hosting the actual external DNS for coffeesec.com on another VM, dedicated to requests coming in from outside. This would let me move away from Namecheap as my name server and only keep them for registrar duties. The reason I’m not doing it just yet is because I want to make sure it’s a much tighter setup with DNSSEC and anything else, plus there are a lot of records to manage for email and various validations.
In other news, I’ve totally switched over to Immich from PhotoPrism, as much as I like the presentation and ease of use. One of the main things I needed was multi-user libraries so my photos didn’t just get mixed in to a big bucket with my wife’s pictures. Immich has storage templates now that work pretty well to let me configure how the file paths are set up on the NAS when I import photos, so I got a setup that I was pretty happy with and spent a day importing everything from my phone, some old stuff on my NAS, and everything I could retrieve from Google. For the most part I am pretty happy with how it handled everything, just a few hiccups with missing metadata on random Google photos, namely dates, no idea how that happened. I can manually fix those though. Otherwise it works great, can easily set up other users, can share out albums and have joint albums if we want to mix some vacation pictures. My new family photo album
It’s wild having 22 years of photos to scroll though, but for the life of me I don’t know why I scanned photographs in high school and saved them at 450x300. Hopefully I can find the originals to rescan at some point.
Today’s header - Rattlesnake Lake, the end of a long hike out of Snoqualmie, WA