Kraus Cloud

Our Netgate security appliance comes with four wired ethernet interfaces, but one is already in use as our uplink and the other three aren't enough to meet our lab's needs. We're going to need more interfaces so we'll be connecting an 8-port (interface) gigabit ethernet switch to our firewall in this post. In fact, we'll be doing a lot more than just connecting our switch to our firewall. Other objectives include dividing our ten (10) physical interfaces into five (5) separate Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs), disabling inter-VLAN routing, hardening our switch, and backing up our configuration.

pfSense running on a Netgate 4200 appliance not only provides our lab with network security, but it will also serve as our lab's core router. pfSense also boasts a lot of other functionality that we'll be leveraging throughout this series and beyond. The best part, pfSense is completely free and open source! This post is a bit on the longer side, but hang in there because it's chock-full of good stuff that's at the foundation of our home lab and core to learning networking and cybersecurity.

By the end of this lab, you will have built your own personal cloud consisting of a virtualization server to run your applications, a security appliance to help ensure your network is locked down, a network switch virtualized into four separate virtual networks, and an endless number of possibitlies for how to use your home lab. It's not much of a cloud if you don't have a presence on the web, so this lab will also include guidance on how to build a NextJS web app and deploy it on your own NGINX web server. Start thinking of a name for your cloud and review the rundown of required components listed below. Let's gear up and go!

I'm building a mockup in Figma for a new feature at work and I've been asked to include a range slider that allows a user to change "synonym sensitivity" on a scale from 1 to 100. I figured building a slider in Figma would be a worthy challenge and one worth sharing. What's more, this tutorial will expose you to highly useful Figma concepts such as components/variants, constraints, interactions, and basic styling. Let's jump in!

So, you've dabbled with create-react-app and you're ready to build and share something amazing with the world. Now what? This post will walk you through creating a GitHub repository to manage and back up your application as well as using GitHub Pages to publish your app to the web.