X Days of Making, Days 3 to 5: Homelab config and coffee ice cream

Mon Dec 22 2025

For the last few days, I've been busy with a bunch of house work, but at the times that I were not, I was working on configuring my "homelab".

My homelab is still in its infancy. Only a Raspberry Pi 4, but I've been following /r/selfhosted (opens new window) for a while now and I've been meaning to try out some things.

I started few weeks ago with Tailscale for VPN access, Pihole (opens new window) for ad-blocking, and Netdata for monitoring. Now, I'm trialing a few more self-hosted apps (opens new window). In particular, I've been using Mealie (opens new window) for recipe management.

Once I started to add more services, however, I ran into the issue of having to remember ports. iOS homescreen bookmarks don't seem to like pointing to specific ports and password managers also don't like ports.

However, it has been a right headache to try and figure out how to set up SSL certificates for my host that has a private IP address. This blog post (opens new window) finally saved my bacon after I tried a bunch of other approaches.

I tried this approach (opens new window) to set up subdomains at first which looked easy enough from the outset, but my browsers quickly started to complain and even completely prevented me from accessing my subdomains without HTTPS.

Some things I learned were:

• Apparently Chrome doesn't like .local addresses.
• Tailscale uses HTTP by default (opens new window), but your traffic still encrypted, because it is over VPN.
• To create an SSL certificate for a private IP, you either need to run your own certificate authority or you need to complete DNS validation. However, Let's Encrypt only supports certain domain registrars (opens new window) for automatic DNS validation. And I'd only recently moved to a smaller South African domain provider. 🙈

All in all, DNS is a pain, but I'm really happy I get to access my self-hosted services via their own HTTPS-enabled subdomains now!

Bonus: coffee ice cream 🍨

Today I got around to using my ice cream machine again and I made this (opens new window) incredibly delicious "bold and bracing" coffee ice cream.