MRDTech Blog
Infrastructure notes without the ceremony.
Practical writing on endpoint management, automation, security, and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Articles
- Replacing Google and Bing Search: Self-Hosting SearXNG Chrome and Edge are really front ends for Google and Bing. I couldn't swap the browser with one container, but I could swap what sits behind the address bar - here's how I built it and what it actually buys you.
- A Better Way to Get Your News Feeds: Self-Hosting FreshRSS I got tired of letting algorithms decide what articles and videos I saw, so I built my own reading and watching list instead - here's why, and how I built it.
- Why I Ditched My Traditional VPN for Tailscale Traditional site-to-site and remote-access VPNs solve connectivity, but they cost you in attack surface and admin overhead. Here's why I moved my homelab to Tailscale's WireGuard mesh, and how I set it up.
- Job Watch: The App I Built to Automate My Own Job Search Job hunting is a data problem disguised as an emotional one. I built a self-hosted aggregator that scored every listing against my resume and told me the ones worth my time - here's how it worked.
- RustDesk: A Self-Hosted TeamViewer Alternative Why I moved off the public RustDesk rendezvous/relay infrastructure and stood up my own hbbs/hbbr stack, plus the architecture, key handling, and verification steps to prove it actually works.
- AD & M365 Onboarding Automation: A WPF PowerShell GUI for New User Provisioning A look at a WPF-based PowerShell onboarding tool that creates Active Directory users, waits for Entra ID sync, and assigns Microsoft 365 licenses without turning every new hire into a checklist marathon.
- Building a Self-Hosted NOC Dashboard for My Homelab Why I got tired of checking a dozen different admin panels and built a single-pane-of-glass dashboard instead — with real multi-user auth and TOTP, not the usual LAN-only shortcut.
- Building a Technical Portfolio as a Modern Job Search Tool A practical look at why a self-hosted technical portfolio, real project writeups, and a blog can do more for infrastructure job searches than a resume alone.
- Building a Hosted Resume Link Recruiters Can Actually Use Why a fast, hosted resume page on your own domain is a cleaner recruiting tool than sending another stale PDF attachment into the void.
- Building an AdGuard Home + Unbound Recursive DNS Stack A practical walkthrough for using AdGuard Home as the filtering layer and Unbound as a dedicated recursive resolver instead of forwarding everything to public DNS.
- Building a Homelab for Real-World IT Skills A practical look at how a real homelab builds defensible IT skills across virtualization, Docker, networking, backups, security monitoring, automation, and recovery.
- I Built a Voice Assistant Better Than Alexa — Here's How A practical look at building a local-first Home Assistant voice assistant with wake word detection, cloud STT/TTS, LLM-backed conversation, and real automations that go beyond rigid smart-speaker commands.
- Building a Zero-Trust Homelab: Cloudflare Access, Tunnel, and the Real DNS/Routing Picture A practical look at how I use Cloudflare Access, Tunnel, WAF, DNS Gateway, Nginx Proxy Manager, and static-site routing without pretending every service belongs behind the same ingress path.
- Building an Autonomous AI Agent for My Homelab (Meet Gilfoyle) How I built a self-hosted AI agent with scoped infrastructure visibility, a read-only tool gateway, Obsidian-backed retrieval, delegated coding runtimes, and hard lessons from a real bind-mount incident.
- Modern Device Provisioning: Autopilot, Entra ID, and the End of Imaging A practical sysadmin walkthrough of replacing traditional Windows imaging with Autopilot, Entra ID, Intune compliance, and app delivery.