Category: Networking
Passion, opinion, questions, chaos. It’s all here.
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Home Lab Failure Recovery & CISSP Lessons from a VLAN Misconfiguration
A single VLAN misconfiguration triggered a full network blackout in my home lab—no router, no hypervisor, no recovery. Even Kali Linux couldn’t save me. But this wasn’t just a technical failure—it was a masterclass in resilience, disaster recovery, and applying CISSP principles in real time. As I prepare for my CISSP exam (Winter 2025), I’m…
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5 Reasons Policy-Based Routing in Multi-NIC VMs Solves Asymmetric Routing Issues
A multi-NIC VM in my home lab became unreachable from some VLANs due to asymmetric routing—replying via the wrong interface and triggering security drops. Implementing policy-based routing fixed this by ensuring responses use the same path they arrived on, maintaining strict security without disabling protections like reverse path filtering. This reinforced key CISSP principles like…
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How I Fixed SMB Access Issues to My Home NAS Behind a VLAN-Enabled Router
Troubleshooting complex network issues on a home NAS can be frustrating, especially when VLANs, firewall rules, and SMB services all interplay. In this post, I walk through diagnosing connectivity problems between VLANs and a TrueNAS server, fixing permission errors with Samba, and configuring firewall rules to allow seamless SMB access — all without exposing sensitive…