Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I am working on my home network. Let’s get started!
Where to begin? Last week I left off with Puppy Linux. Well, I successfully installed it to a USB. While hardening FireFox, I noticed that the popular search-engine/online-advertising company is pushing out a new set of standards for their popular browser called Manifest 3 that will cripple functionality browser-based ad blockers rely on to keep prying eyes out (all in the name of privacy, of course); Mozilla/FireFox will be adopting these standards, with roll out this month: January 2023.
Network Collapse
In response, I prioritized setting up PiHole, a network-based ad blocker which won’t be affected by Manifest 3 and will work on Android devices. I soon learn it’s available in an OCI/“Docker” container. Long story short, I install it to ButtonMash and my old laptop for logistical reasons involving my dormant Family Photo Trunk project. I went to adjust the router’s DNS (Domain Name Server) settings to point at my PiHole containers figuring the worst that could happenwould be I just need five minutes tops to revert changes… the router moved itself from 192.168.0.1 to 162.168.1.1, collapsing the home network – including the workstation I was planning on using to fix it!
I was more than a bit stunned. Lucky for me, my old laptop was on a static IP address; unlucky: Bitwarden password manager has been a pain on that machine as of late, so I had to copy it manually from elsewhere. Once I was in, I reverted the DNS settings to automatic and most computers recovered by toggling network off and on (or rebooting) to refresh the automatic DHCP settings.
Upstairs Workstation
A while back, I rigged up a Raspberry Pi to work as a Wi-Fi catcher/subnet router, and it’s served me well up to this point. I switched its static, subnet-facing IP so it didn’t conflict with the one now claimed by the router, but as Iwas researching how to adjust its DHCP settings for the new subnet, I noticed its base operating system is at least months past end-of-life.
Takeaway
I need to stop quoting optimistic worst-case scenarios. Gremlins can and will make a fool of me. On the other hand, I’m very thankful I had my laptop-server still able to navigate the crippled network with its static IP.
I’ll be keeping the router where it is and see how saving the band of 192.168.0.* for static IP’s plays out. I guess I have the rest of this month’s projects planned out…
Final Question
What is the biggest computer oops you’ve ever had (and recovered from)?
Furthermore
I had a small adventure getting this post from LibreOffice on my upstairs workstation over to my blog without Internet. The way my filesystem is set up, it the save feature hangs badly when a mounted network drive doesn’t respond. I ended up using a .txt file on a thumb drive, and dumping it to the command line with cat, a terminal program to concatenate.