nzhillnet · Home lab, automation and self-hosting by Roland Hill

Diagram of mail clients connecting to OpenLDAP over LDAPS, trusted by a private root CA

Building a Private LDAP Address Book with OpenLDAP

A private OpenLDAP address book secured with LDAPS, providing centralised contact lookup for Mutt and Thunderbird on a LAN.

Diagram of the anacron-scheduled rsync backup flow from workstation to Synology NAS with email reporting

Building a Resilient Linux Workstation Backup System with rsync

A resilient Linux workstation backup system using rsync over SSH to a Synology NAS, with automated scheduling, timeout protection, and email reporting.

Diagram of workstations relaying mail through a Postfix smart host to an upstream provider

Mail Relay at Home: Postfix Smart Host

How to build a reliable home mail relay using Postfix as a smart host with msmtp clients on Linux workstations, enabling sendmail-compatible outbound email for scripts and system alerts.

Diagram of the Hugo publishing pipeline: writing and approval host, Gitea, build and publish host, and the public website

Automating Hugo Deployments (Git-Based Workflow)

How this site is published: posts are previewed, approved and committed from my home-lab console to a self-hosted Gitea, and a build host in the DMZ pulls read-only on a timer, rebuilds and syncs the site. Includes what I learned rebuilding it after losing the Git server.

Diagram of SSH and HTTP flows between the trusted workstation, DMZ web server, internal Git server and comments bridge

Locking Down SSH in a DMZ for Hugo Deployments

Hardening SSH to a DMZ web server revealed that my Hugo deploys also needed outbound Git access. Later I removed the inbound deploy trigger entirely, and that turned out to be the best hardening step.