I first got started on the network run from the attic switch to the 2nd floor den — back in October of 2021. I finished it a year later, so it’s about time to get this blog post published 😛

I’ve written before about how I deploy this blog using Drone.io. It works well, and does exactly what you’d expect.

Lately I’ve started looking into reducing complexity in homelab systems that I use — and using “a Continuous Integration platform for busy development teams” felt a bit overkill for this tiny blog.

So I switched to something simple; GNU Make.

I’ve set up a local Arch repository, a dynamic reverse proxy cache using nginx — and a local “build server” for AUR packages, using aurutils.

Here is how, and why 👇

Mona and I got married in January 😃 We had a small civil ceremony — and dinner with our kids, parents, best man, and maid of honor.

Afterwards we were driven to Plaza Hotel in Oslo, where we spent the weekend ❤️

I’ve previously implemented a series taxonomy in Hugo, but it only supported a single series per post and used intersect which is kind of slow.

Here is my improved implementation of a series taxonomy in Hugo 👇

We recently moved the twins into their own bedrooms, after sharing a room for nine years — it was finally time for some privacy 🙂

With their own rooms; they also got their own computers — a life long dream 😉 Those computers needs network, proper network, not Wi-Fi.

In November last year — I started building a DIY security alarm system, using a Raspberry Pi as the controller. My plan was to make a self-sustained system, using proper alarm hardware — like PIR sensors and sirens.

Integration with Home Assistant would be an add-on, not a requirement. I wanted the system to be as redundant and fault-tolerant as I could make it.

This is a pretty long story, with some twists and turns — let’s get into it 👇

We recently put up a wall in our previous family/play room — to make another bedroom, with a hallway outside. I might want an access point in that hallway at some point.

So I repurposed a telephone outlet and conduit, to run a CAT6 cable from the hallway down to the patch panel in the basement.

I stumbled onto NextDNS recently — it’s like a cloud hosted Pi-hole. I tried it for a few days, but this post isn’t about that.

Reading about the different block lists in NextDNS, and digging deeper into DNS ad blocking gave me motivation to change my current setup — and that is what this post is about 🙂

Searching for a tool to keep track of IP addresses; I stumbled onto Netbox — and was blown away by what it could do 🤯 I could put everything there: racks, servers, patch panels, Wi-Fi access points, power distribution, network runs. Everything!

With the electricity prices we’ve seen in Europe lately — I wanted to see if we could reduce our energy consumption. I’m specifically looking at “wasted” energy, meaning usage we can reduce without even noticing it.

Having a central place to view or search through server logs is awesome. I’ve used Graylog in the past, but I’ve always felt it was a bit cumbersome to set up and use — and it felt overkill for my need.

Instead I gave Grafana Loki and Promtail a try 👇

Controlling my Komfovent balanced ventilation system through Home Assistant — opens up a world of possibilities.

Here are three automations I use to make the system a bit smarter 🙂

Mona needed more places to plant her flowers, so I built her some planter boxes — using impregnated wood and lining the inside with landscape fabric.

The Unifi UAP-AC-M access point in my garage stopped working a few weeks ago. Or, the device didn’t stop working, it still showed up in the Unifi controller and I could ping it. But it stopped providing Wi-Fi connectivity — my phone connected, but got no network access…

I remembered experiencing this before — the VLANs for user and guest Wi-Fi wasn’t allowed through the D-Link switch. I had simply not configured them, but why was it failing now?

Trying to log into the switch — I found that it no longer got an IP from the DHCP server. By all accounts; it looked like the switch had been reset.

Last year — I wrote about plans for my home network, or home network v2, as I called it. Let’s take a look at what I have done, what remains, and what has changed since then.

After my Wi-Fi mapping adventure — I found a few spots with low Wi-Fi signal. Both kids’ rooms on the 2nd floor only had mediocre signal, at -67 and -68 dBm 2.4 GHz, and the side garden had -71 dBm — which is terrible!

I also discovered that Mona’s side of the bed had much worse Wi-Fi signal than my side. This was because I had a clear line of sight to the UAP-AC-IW in the den, but the signal to Mona’s side had to go through a wall and her wardrobe…

Simply not acceptable, something had to be done!

Hello again reader; I’ve been AFK for a few months — got fed up with computers and did other things 🙂

I’ve had many routers over the years — Linksys WRT54GL, Linux and iptables, ASUS RT-N66U, Ubiquiti USG, OPNsense, Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, and MikroTik CCR1009. At least those are the ones I can remember.

But I’ve been fascinated by VyOS ever since I first heard about it, even more so after using the EdgeRouter CLI. As both VyOS and EdgeOS are forks of Vyatta.

Fascinated and intimidated is probably more accurate — the lack of a GUI doesn’t give you a lot of help… But at the same time, it’s a great learning experience — you have to know and understand what you are doing 🙂

So I set out to replace my internet facing router — with a virtualized VyOS instance 🙂

We got balanced ventilation installed last year, and have been very happy with the system 🙂 But we quickly found that we needed to expand it into two more rooms — the 1st floor bathroom, used as the laundry room, and the play room, which will be a bedroom at some point.

Time to fix that 🙂