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Stardate: 20211223.1402
Location: Foxy's
Input Device: Gemini PDA
Audio: Restaurant patrons
Visual: A-frame restaurant, holiday decor
Emotional State: wet, warming up, present
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It has been raining here and cold (for SoCal) and I decided to stop
at one of the family restaurants I enjoy for some breakfast and
shelter. I always enjoy when we do get some weather here since we
don't get much and it is a nice change. I grew up with frequent
weather changes and when it does happen, it brings me to the now and
I am able to observe more than I would otherwise.
Lately, I have been revisiting pi-hole[1] on my network. It is
basically an ad blocker/DNS server for the local network that runs on
minimal resources. I was running it on a Raspberry Pi before, but
ended up repurposing the hardware for another project and running ad
blocking software locally on my computers.
Since I have been messing around with my home network, I decided to
run pi-hole in a virtual machine and have the devices use pi-hole
for DNS. I had forgotten how much ad and "telemetry-related"
traffic happens on my network. Even more so now with the rest of
the family's devices. I was surprised how much chatter happens.
One of the devices that showed up quickly due to its chatter is the
Roku box. Man, that thing must be homesick with all the calls it
keeps trying to make back to the mothership.
I keep this device, along with the smart TV and the blu-ray player
on its own network segment with its own hardware router.
Previously, it was behind an old ASUS wifi router (wifi disabled)
which ran the last version of tomato firmware[2] from 2010.
Since both were old, I repurposed an old, but a little newer
TP-Link wifi router with a fairly recent version of dd-wrt.[3]
These old routers seem to work out fine, especially with the wifi
turned off. I have had no problems with the ASUS router and the
old tomato running almost 24/7 over the years.
It turns out that I can repurpose the ASUS, yet again! After
putting the TP-Link in place, I searched around for any other
options for the ASUS router and it looks like the community has
forked tomato to a custom firmware called FreshTomato![4] I
look forward to tinkering with this in the near future!
It's really nice that pi-hole and other tools make it so easy to
view the statistics in a user-friendly web front end. It sure beats
trying to parse log files manually or slice and dice the data in a
spreadsheet like back in the day. That was so time consuming and the
data was usually static. Now I can see the stats in real time and
spend more time sleuthing and less time data mining!
I keep my home network segmented with a mix of VLANS and physical
routers to segregate my servers and various devices. Sometimes it
can be quite a chore to manage all of this. I've been trying to
brainstorm a way to aggregate all of the devices, dashboards, config
tools, etc. Before, the way I would deal with this was to just
have a handmade static HTML document with local URLs, notes,
IP addresses, etc. (yeah, I'm old school and I like banging rocks
together.) I'm sure there are better free and open-source tools
out there these days. One that I have been looking at is called
cockpit[5] but I have only started doing the research.
How do you people in the community manage all of your network
devices at home? I'd be interested to know! Feel free to send me a
message at xiled[at]sdf[dot]org.
Much gratitude to the community and the developers who enable me
to continue using old hardware and have powerful, open source tools!
[1] https://pi-hole.net/
[2] http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/
[3] https://dd-wrt.com/
[4] http://freshtomato.org/
[5] https://cockpit-project.org/
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