Self-Hosting

OpenVPN is a reliable and time-tested VPN protocol that allows organizing secure remote access to a local network. MikroTik RouterOS supports OpenVPN in server mode starting from version 6.x (TCP), and from version 7+ — also UDP, but with a number of architectural limitations:

• mandatory authentication by username/password even when using certificates;
• limited list of ciphers and algorithms;
• absence of some features of “classic” OpenVPN.

Despite this, OpenVPN on MikroTik remains a popular solution — especially in scenarios where clients do not support WireGuard or compatibility with legacy systems is required.

If you do self-hosting, run a home lab, or manage a small VPS, you’re probably familiar with Portainer. It’s the de-facto standard: a powerful, all-encompassing “Swiss Army knife” for Docker.

But let’s be honest: sometimes the Swiss Army knife is too heavy when you just need to peel an apple.

Recently I discovered Dockge — a tool from the same developer as the popular Uptime Kuma. It made me completely rethink how I manage containers. In this article I’ll explain why Dockge can be the perfect replacement for Portainer in many scenarios.

In a world where data volume grows faster than GPU prices, the question “Where to store files?” becomes critical. Google Drive and iCloud are convenient but expensive and not unlimited. External hard drives are unreliable. Ready-made solutions from Synology or QNAP are good, but hit the wallet.

Enter TrueNAS. It’s an operating system that turns a regular computer into a powerful enterprise-grade network-attached storage (NAS).

Let’s figure out why TrueNAS is so popular, what challenges you’ll face, and whether this system is right for you.

In today’s world of AI models it’s easy to get lost. You have ChatGPT for some tasks, Claude for others, you want to experiment locally with Llama 3, and for coding — use a specialized model. The result is a desktop turned into chaos of browser tabs and applications.

What if there were a single unified interface that could connect to all those models? A place where you can easily switch between GPT-4o, a local Llama 3 and dozens of other models?