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!