René Welches

In the beginning there were two 16 GB DDR4 RAM sticks and a 1 TB M.2 SSD that were gathering dust. After researching mini PCs, I decided to purchase the GMKtec NucBox M5 Ultra as a bare-bones system. The AMD Ryzen 7 7730U processor provides plenty of power for virtualization, and the compact form factor makes it perfect for a home lab setup. I got it on Black Friday sale for $255.89. Surprisingly, there were no import taxes added to the $255.89. The PC arrived from China after about two weeks.

In the past, I used Pi-Hole (for ad blocking/DNS) and PiVPN (with WireGuard protocol), a Google domain, and Inadyn (DDNS client) for VPN. Everything was working great until Google decided to sell their DNS business to Squarespace (not a great move, Google). To make matters worse, Squarespace doesn’t support DDNS. I was already considering switching my DNS to something like Cloudflare, but then I saw NetworkChuck promoting Twingate and decided to give it a try. And I must say, I love it.