Posts on Casual Compute

Ad blocking recursive DNS for NixOS

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 17:02:21 -0400

Does the idea of a network-wide ad blocker sound interesting? Luckily, not only is this easy to implement, it can provide more privacy and faster load times when browsing the web! Thanks to a handy service called DNS, which is easy to self-host, you can fine tune what domains the devices on your network can access.

This is the second post about my NixOS router project, written as a follow up to this post. This guide will not implement any IPv6 functionality, and is intended for a NixOS system.

Creating a basic router using NixOS

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 17:38:17 -0500

About a month ago, I had a sudden thought pop up in my mind: “I wonder if I could make a router using NixOS?” This happened as I was working on setting up Nginx on my current OPNsense router, which honestly was a hassle. As I’ve been implementing NixOS across my homelab, I got quite comfortable with writing Nix configuration files and using the CLI for most tasks, so the OPNsense UI felt like it was getting in the way. I just wanted to be able to drop in a load balancer module as I do on my NixOS systems and have it work right away. This led to me pursuing this project.

Building a Hugo website with Nix

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 23:19:24 -0500

As I started transitioning my homelab to primarily using NixOS, I realized I needed to find a way to start documenting the work I was doing for my future self. In addition to this I realized how dependent I was on these types of blogs as a learning resource, so I decided to create a website where I can publish this documentation for others who are seeking to pursue similar endeavors. Which leads to the creation of Casual Compute!