This week I didn’t deploy anything major—but I definitely put out some small fires and tightened a few screws behind the scenes.

🎯 The big win: I finalized my Plex custom server string for consistent access across all networks: http://192.168.1.xxx:32400,http://localnashostname.lan:32400,https://plex.mydomain.com

This approach now gives me:
✅ Local fallback via LAN IP and hostname
✅ External access via Cloudflare Tunnel
✅ Full control without relying on Plex’s remote access relays

🔐 On the Cloudflare front, I also:
– Tested Zero Trust + WARP DNS for mobile devices using a secured subdomain (mydns.mydomain.com)
– Verified that VPN-connected mobile clients could route DNS through Pi-hole, but noticed ad filtering inconsistencies, likely due to DoH fallback or device behavior
– Checked Avahi and mDNS behavior post-tunnel container tweaks—still stable across VLANs

💥 Meanwhile, my Pi-hole Web Admin suddenly broke and had to be manually recovered. No data loss, but another good reminder of the importance of local dashboards being tied to container or web server quirks.
📡 Bonus chaos: A Unifi update quietly downgraded IoT devices through a new “IoT connectivity improvement” setting to Wi-Fi 4, affecting things like Chromecast. Still testing whether this bottlenecks 4K Plex streams on 2.4GHz.

🧠 Key Lessons:
– Split DNS only works when fallback options are solid
– WARP DNS filtering sounds cool—until you hit device-level DoH exceptions
– When the Pi-hole dashboard disappears, you really feel the value of good internal tools

Homelabs are 10% setup, 90% detective work. Progress doesn’t always mean deploying—it sometimes means restoring what shouldn’t have broken in the first place.
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