Shekhar Vaidya

When someone mentions a tiny, cheap, always-on piece of hardware, their mind usually goes to a single-board computer (SBC) like a Raspberry Pi, Arduino Uno, or Orange Pi. Generally, it is the right choice, too. I was on the same path a few weeks ago. I was looking to buy a Raspberry Pi 5 to host my DNS server. Before getting it, I looked at the old Android phone living in my drawer and decided to use it as a DNS server.

I reached a point in my homelab journey where it started to feel like I was logging in with similar credentials for separate services. I always liked the idea of one centralized authentication. I was familiar with SSO too, but I was hesitant to implement it because almost every self-hosted SSO guide seemed to begin with Keycloak. Keycloak always felt like a heavyweight identity service, and I didn’t want to manage another piece of heavy infrastructure.

Port forwarding is the default move for remote access. People do it because it's simple. I too was in the same situation. I used to open a port for each service I wanted to access remotely. The question never crossed my mind: “What would happen if I opened a port on my router?” One evening, while doing mental math on how many rules had piled up in my ER605 virtual server list, I realized I was exposing everything to the public, even though most of the services were never intended for anyone but me.