About
Networking and self-hosting, minus the jargon.
I’m the person behind Dad’s a Nerd! — running pfSense, Docker, and a growing pile of homelab hardware in a spare corner of the house, and writing down what actually worked (and what didn’t) so the next person doesn’t have to relearn it the hard way.
Why this site exists
Most networking content online falls into one of two buckets: marketing copy dressed up as a tutorial, or documentation written for people who already know 90% of what they’re looking up. There’s not a lot in between — the kind of guide that assumes you’re capable but not already an expert, walks through the actual steps, and tells you honestly when something is more complicated than it needs to be.
That’s the gap this site tries to fill. Every guide here comes from something I actually built and ran — a real pfSense box, real firewall rules, real mistakes along the way. When a post says “this is the part that breaks if you get it wrong,” it’s because it broke, and I fixed it, and I’m saving you the debugging session.
What you’ll find here
- pfSense and networking guides — WireGuard VPNs, VLAN segmentation, DNS, IPv6 — written for home labs and small setups, not enterprise data centers
- Self-hosting walkthroughs — running real services on real hardware, including the parts that don’t make it into the official docs
- Honest tradeoffs — where a guide has a “why you might not want to do this” section instead of pretending every setup is right for everyone
A note on how these guides get built
Some of the writing and editing on this site is done with AI assistance — drafting, technical review, and diagram generation. Every guide reflects real configuration I’ve actually run, and technical claims get checked against current documentation rather than assumed. If something here is wrong, it’s a mistake worth telling me about (see Contact), not evidence the whole thing is unreliable — networking documentation drifts out of date fast, and I’d rather fix an error than leave it.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or a topic you’d like covered — see the Contact page for the best way to reach me.