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Welcome to HopBox Blogs

Welcome to the official HopBox blog! This is where we’ll share product updates, technical tutorials, networking insights, and stories from the team behind HopBox.

We’re building HopBox in the open, and this blog is part of that commitment to transparency. Here’s what you can look forward to:

  • Product Updates — New features, firmware releases, and cloud dashboard improvements.
  • Technical Deep-Dives — Detailed posts on DNS, SD-WAN, VPN configurations, firewall management, and network architecture.
  • How-To Guides — Step-by-step tutorials for getting the most out of your HopBox deployment.
  • Industry Insights — Our take on trends in enterprise networking, open-source infrastructure, and network security.

HopBox is built entirely on Free and Open Source Software. We believe that critical network infrastructure should be transparent and auditable. Every component — from the firmware running on your device to the cloud dashboard managing it — is open for inspection and contribution.

We publish new posts regularly. Whether you’re a network engineer managing hundreds of devices or an IT admin setting up your first SD-WAN, there’s something here for you.

Have a topic you’d like us to cover? Reach out to us at info@unmukti.in — we’d love to hear from you.

Happy networking!

DNS Chronicles - Part 1

Managing authoritative and recursive name servers (i.e. DNS servers) at hopbox, has shown us a bunch of quirks and insights of domain name system.

Domain Name System

Basic function of Domain Name System (DNS) is to translate domain names to IP and vice-versa. It’s the phonebook of the computer. Why you may ask, because human’s remember domain names easily, wikipedia.org is easier than 103.102.166.224 . The IP is then used by the computer to fetch required resource for us.

Hopbox Public GNU software mirror

We at Hopbox have been Free Software users and contributors for more than a decade now. We were looking to contribute more to the community in a different from usual way. Downloads from GNU FTP mirrors were slow in India and there existed only 1 mirror (when we decided) for whole of India. As of 4th April 2024, we’re only GNU mirror in India.