Most of the internet is rented. Your email lives on someone else’s server. Your DNS queries pass through someone else’s resolver. Your data moves through pipes owned by companies whose incentives are not yours.
That doesn’t have to be the arrangement.
North Engineer is an independent publication about owning your infrastructure — actually owning it. Email servers, DNS, mesh networking, cryptographic identity, self-hosted services. The unglamorous, load-bearing systems most of the industry ignores in favor of whatever is new, expensive, or fundable. Every guide here is built from real deployments — things that have been run, broken, fixed, and run again. No affiliate links. No ads. No algorithm deciding what you see.
Start Here
New to the site? These pieces give you a good sense of what’s here and why it matters.
Email Sender Authentication: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and ARC Explained
The four protocols that determine whether your email gets delivered or dumped in spam — and why understanding them matters whether you run your own mail server or not. If you’ve ever wondered why legitimate email ends up in junk, this is where to start.
Blocky: Lightweight DNS Ad Filtering Without the Database
Pi-hole is the default recommendation, but it carries a database, a web server, and more complexity than the job requires. Blocky does DNS-level ad filtering with a single binary and a YAML file. Faster, leaner, and easier to reason about.
OpenPGP Key Management with Keyoxide Identity Proofs
PGP has a reputation problem — it’s perceived as complicated and niche. Keyoxide doesn’t fix PGP, but it makes cryptographic identity proofs genuinely usable. This covers key management and linking your identity across platforms in a way that’s verifiable without relying on a central authority.
Cold Weather Charging of Lithium-Ion Batteries: Lessons for Meshtastic Deployments
Lithium-ion batteries and cold weather have a specific, damaging interaction that most deployment guides don’t mention. If you’re running Meshtastic nodes outdoors in winter — or any battery-powered hardware in low temperatures — this is required reading before you brick a cell.
What’s Covered Here
Email infrastructure — authentication, headers, self-hosting, encryption. Email is foundational and widely misunderstood. Most people don’t know what DKIM is until their legitimate mail starts bouncing.
DNS — resolvers, ad filtering, DNS-over-HTTPS, network-level blocking. DNS is where a lot of privacy and performance gains are available, and where a lot of surveillance happens quietly.
Mesh networking — Meshtastic, LoRa, off-grid communication. Long-range, license-free, infrastructure-independent radio. The kind of thing that works when everything else doesn’t.
Cryptographic identity — PGP, S/MIME, Keyoxide. How to sign things, prove things, and communicate without relying on a platform to vouch for you.
Terminal and CLI — shell configuration, macOS and Linux tooling, the interfaces that actually make you faster.
Self-hosting — the specific services, hardware, and trade-offs involved in running things yourself.
The Philosophy
Technology ownership isn’t a luxury — it’s a prerequisite for freedom. The world has been shaped around subscription models and walled gardens precisely because they’re profitable for corporations, not because they’re inevitable. It’s easy to feel trapped by these systems because they’re embedded everywhere. But they’re not immutable.
That said, this philosophy isn’t universal advice. A small non-profit, a local government agency, a three-person team — these organizations often have no business running their own mail server. For them, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace is the right call: maintained by professionals, resilient by default, and not a distraction from the actual mission. Self-hosting carries real operational costs, and pretending otherwise isn’t honesty, it’s ideology.
What this site pushes back on is the unexamined assumption. Permanently renting software shouldn’t be the default — it should be a deliberate choice, made after asking what the alternatives actually cost and what you’re giving up to avoid them. That conversation is rarely had. Subscription models are so normalized that “just use the SaaS” feels like the rational position, and owning anything feels like a hobby project. That framing deserves scrutiny.
For individuals, homelab operators, and technically capable small organizations, ownership is often more viable than advertised. The goal here is to document what that looks like in practice — honestly, including the trade-offs — so the choice can actually be made.
The writing doesn’t assume you’re a computer scientist, but it doesn’t hide the technical details either. If something requires specific knowledge to follow, the prerequisites are listed. If something is hard, that’s acknowledged. The goal is clarity, not simplification.
About
North Engineer is a 20-year infrastructure engineer with deep experience in government technology, cybersecurity, and building systems that actually work. This is a sole-authored publication — the perspective here is informed by real experience, but it’s not comprehensive. I make mistakes. I have blind spots. When I get something wrong, I try to acknowledge it.
I operate under the name “North Engineer” rather than my legal name, maintaining a professional boundary between my personal identity and my public technical work. Reach out via email at the@north.engineer.
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What you should know: This site doesn’t track you with analytics, sell your data, or create profiles of your behavior. No affiliate links. This is not a business trying to extract maximum value from its audience — it’s an attempt to contribute something useful to a community of people trying to take back their technology. All interactions are subject to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, both written in plain language.
If this resonates with you, start exploring. Read about technologies we’ve deployed. Understand the costs and trade-offs. Think about what you actually want from your infrastructure. Then build it. You’re not locked in.
Contact: the@north.engineer — OpenPGP: E589C9C0FE6E653E00AC8781DDABBA029BCFF4E7