A DMZ (demilitarized zone) is a segmented part of a network that is used to host all publicly accessible websites and services. The intention is to protect the internal network from external threats. It is an effective strategy to minimize public exposure of your critical assets as well as limit the damage caused when an intruder is able to penetrate your network. A great definition of a DMZ can be found here.

When searching online, you will find many ways to improve wireless performance. One suggestion that I think you may not see often is to use more wires. ‘Using more wires will improve wireless performance? I thought the point of wireless was to use less wires?!' While that may be true, it is important to understand the physics of wireless networking. There is only so much bandwidth available among the range of frequencies used by wireless transmissions.

Getting flooded with unwanted emails is an issue that everyone faces. Hitting the unsubscribe button may help some with the issue. However, there are some emails that would be nice to keep for a short while before they are deleted. For example, I like getting emails with discounts for various online stores, but I do not want them cluttering my email account. The discounts tend to expire within a few days or a week.

WireGuard is a modern designed VPN that uses the latest cryptography for stronger security, is very lightweight, and is relatively easy to set up (mostly). I say ‘mostly’ because I found setting up WireGuard in OPNsense to be more difficult than I anticipated. The basic setup of the WireGuard VPN itself was as easy as the authors claim on their website, but I came across a few gotcha’s. The gotcha’s occur with functionality that is beyond the scope of the WireGuard protocol so I cannot fault them for that.

If you have software/services running on your local network that you want to remotely access, you may have encountered a situation in which your IP address changes periodically. Many ISPs do not assign static IP addresses to non-business accounts especially for IPv4 addresses because they are extremely limited and have technically been exhausted for some time now. When your modem stays connected for a long period of time with an ISP, it is possible your IP address will not change often.