Category: Homelab

Posted on

Hardware Firewall Up!

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

I left off last week having made attempts on four separate nights trying to get the hardware firewall online in a production context. When I tested it between my upstairs workstation and its OpenWRT+Raspberry Pi router/Wi-Fi adapter, it worked fine. Put it back in production between our ISP’s gateway and our existing gaming router, and no one gets Internet.

The solution: pull the gateway’s plug for 30 seconds and let it reboot. Internet solved.

Longer explanation: my ISP box is in some sort of bridge mode, where it’s supposed to pass the external IP address to a single device (usually a router, but can be a normal computer). In this mode, it didn’t like this device getting swapped out – possibly as a security measure. It still reserves the address 10.0.0.1 as itself through out the network, a behavior I took to be half-bridge mode, but my surprise this week while fiddling with settings was that it did in-fact pass on the external address.

Takeaway

I expected the struggle to continue a lot longer, but I actually figured it out pretty quickly once I started researching the symptoms online. I explored the settings a bit more. I’d like to move the functions of PiHole over, but the web interface has a drop-down menu for block lists instead of a text box. I’ll look into it another time. Instead, I spent a good chunk of the week weeding grass and getting a sunburn.

Final Question

Have you ever found you were rebooting the wrong thing? I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or on my Socials!

Posted on

Server Month: Data Preservation Ceremony

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today is part 2 of server month. Let’s get started!

Per my original draft of last week’s blog (before I suffered a power outage), I’m dedicating this February to testing the idea of study posts. Goal-oriented posts make for a satisfying story, but I often exhaust myself trying to reach big milestones and stress out when I manufacture victories. This month, while I would like to safely overhaul my server setup, I’m going to do my best to have no goalposts aside from writing between three hundred and a thousand words. We’ll see how long that lasts.

When I first ButtonMash (my current home server) used, I also bought one of its twins for my father. His new system is stable now, and so he has relinquished control of the old system. At the point of handover, it was dual booted with Linux Mint and Debian – with Debian being the less used. With this in mind, I’m planning on overwriting the Debian drive and keeping Mint around just in case.

As a part of the ritual before wiping a drive, I examined it for data we might want to keep. I spotted some images from a high quality set of Bible pictures my church has the rights to use, but our local copy is stuck on an external hard disk that fell and doesn’t work anymore. In total, I figure I’ve salvaged around 50 to 56 distinct photos of a much larger set. I locked onto the pattern of five digits and a .jpg extension, which came in handy when searching for additional survivors. Most of them were in a directory titled trash. I moved everything I could find (duplicates included) to an external USB stick from both Linux installations and on over to GoldenOakLibry for safekeeping.

However, when I went to install Rocky 9, my Ventoy USB froze while bringing up its menu – both when attempting legacy and UEFI boot.

Posted on

My First Computer “Rack”

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

So far, I’ve been assembling my servers (ButtonMash, RedLaptop, and GoldenOakLibry) on and under a foldable table. Add a workstation, and it’s getting a bit cluttered. We’ve had a set of glass shelves going unused for a while now, and I think they might do nicely to organize the servers’ room.

I started by measuring ButtonMash’s case against the shelves’ metal frame. While it was close, I estimated an inch vertical clearance once the shelves were in place. Otherwise, the tentative plan was to remove a shelf. My father and I moved the shelves in and loaded them and the setup’s UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). Wiring was relatively straightforward with the traditional wire Medusa in the back, but out from underfoot.

Unfortunately, I left ButtonMash in a precarious state such that a reboot before moving it knocked out my known house of cards supporting PiHole and Unbound. What I didn’t realize was that I never got Caddy working on that machine in the first place. In trying to fix Caddy, I wiped the containers I actually the whole house was using for DNS. As a patch, I pointed the router back at our normal DNS servers.

While I’m trying to avoid server work this month, I went ahead and looked up how to change my specific DNS settings temporarily to restart my DNS containers. From there, I did not encounter any notable issues, though I wasn’t up to testing the removal of my patch.

Takeaway

I have a rack. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Final Question

How do you organize your tech stack?

Privacy Policy