grahamsz

Yeah that’s exactly what i do. I have an A record that points to my house and i update it every 4 hours from a script on my router. Been really happy with cloudflare, they have a weird restriction about using your own nameservers, but as long as you are happy with theirs then they seem to be great.

I was thinking about hooking one up to a GPS module to run a local NTP server

https://blog.networkprofile.org/gps-backed-local-ntp-server/

I’ve seen it done in data center environments where there are two connections to two different switches - so you can do maintenance on either switch without downtime.

Same reason for having dual power feeds to each machine.

I run a wireguard service on my Unifi Edgerouter and it works pretty well for that situations. I can also (in theory) send WOL packets from home assistant but i’ve never tried.

Yeah I’ve wrestled with that too - I justify it to myself that they are so much smaller than Amazon or Microsoft but they are certainly not a small operation.

I also appreciate their participation in WinterCG and the dream of having interoperable runtime environments for serverless platforms. While I don’t think it’s quite there yet, I think it’s a force for good to have a medium-sized player trying to push the interoperability that Amazon obviously isn’t big on.

I have a .ms domain registered with nic.ms but I point the domain name servers at cloudflare and i can manage it in CF with all their features. I do have to pay for it elsewhere but that’s a minor inconvenience.

One benefit of using Cloudflare DNS is that you can place a CDN on the domain apex. So if you’d like to have https://domain.com instead of https://www.domain.com then they can make that happen.

Cloudflare will do DNS for domain suffixes that they don’t support. I’ve never used Porkbun but as long as you can set custom nameservers then you can point it at CF and use all the tools they support.

I’m in Colorado and pay $49.95 for 1000/1000 (though i’m grandfathered in and i think it’s $69.95 for new users). There’s another ISP that offers the same at $70, or i can get 1200/35 cable for about $60.

I can get 2500/2500 for $149 and 10000/10000 for $249 (from my municipal provider) or I can get 6000/6000 for $300 (from the cable provider).

Round here it’s all government run. The city runs power, water, sewer, phone, internet, trash/recycle/compost.

We’ve got the second fastest internet in the country (and it’s free for low income people), our power gets an American Public Power Diamond rating for reliability, we’re (mostly) on track for being 100% renewable power by 2030, the city captures and liquifies the methane from the sewage treatment process and uses it to run the garbage trucks (that say “Powered by You” on them) and our rates for all of that are cheaper than commercial providers.

Amazingly we still run into people who live here, know all that and still believe that the government is incapable of running anything well… it’s kind of startling.

Still, that makes a bit more sense for why you have a generator and that then pretty much requires you have a UPS - so i get it.

Yeah that seems kinda crazy to me too. I’ve lived in my current house for 8 years and the only time the power has gone out was when a vehicle crashed into one of the distribution boxes by the road. Our power and internet come from the same provider so it was a double whammy for several hours.

But I suppose it depends where you are - i worked at a place that had two independent power feeds from two different cities, massive UPSs to run the datacenter for 10 minutes and then two redundant diesel generators with several months of fuel on site. I still saw that go down twice in my time there.

Sure - but you’ve got to start somewhere. There are a lot of people who aren’t experienced sys admins who are buying raspberry pis or arduinos and they are probably really good candidates for self-hosting some of their services. I was surprised to find my neighbor (who’s a PM with a physical security system company) trying to do something with chatGPT, at first I was a little dismissive because i figured she was just typing prompts into the website, but in reality she was having issues with the python bindings and getting her virtual environments straight. If you can get to that point, you can surely self host stuff.

I run git locally for some of my projects and that was trivial to set up - I think anyone who’s used github would have comparable skills to self host gogs or gitea.

Certainly it’s somewhat expensive, but people spend a lot of cloud hosted services too. I’m sure in my house we’re dropping over $100/month on dropbox, chatgpt, google, adobe and probably a half-dozen smaller ones.

I run a bunch of stuff on Docker on my Synology NAS. It’s not quite plug and play but at it’s best it’s quite within the realm of someone who’s got some computer skills. At it’s worst though it can suck up a lot of time. I enjoy that kind of stuff when it’s not mission critical but I used paid cloud services at work for things that I run for free at home - precisely because I don’t want to be the one dealing with downtime in an emergency situation.

Since i’m already running it otherwise, i’ve been running stuff through Home Assistant and using lovelace dashboards.

Yeah that makes sense. I can’t see why there would be a vlan enabled on your local network right now as it would make lots of things not work

Can you enable multiple vlans?

The switch on its own will do nothing for you. It’s only useful with a router that supports VLANs

Unfortunately in your situation you’ll need to replace your current router-modem combo with a dedicated modem, a commercial router (if you don’t want to build your own linux one then EdgeRouters seems pretty good value for money) and a managed switch.

If you want to keep it wired then you’ll need to put it on a separate VLAN from your other devices. A VLAN effectively allows you to create separate ethernet networks over the same physical network. We use them at work to keep factory hardware separate from office hardware and I use them at home to keep a vpn open for streaming geolocked content from another country. Traffic between the two VLANs has to be routed just like it would if they were separate physical networks.

I have an Edgerouter POE which has a small built in switch and supports VLANs so I can easily dedicate a port on the switch to a particular VLAN. In my case I route that traffic through wireguard, but in your case all you really need is setting up NAT for internet access and not route it with your other VLAN.

Any commercial grade routers support VLANs, i’ve seen it on unifi, aruba and fortigate and have never heard of it not being supported.

As others have pointed out, if you have a switch between your TV and Router then that’ll need to be a managed switch that can trunk the vlan code back to the router, otherwise all the traffic will be comingled.

Other thoughts:

You might be able to arrange your IPs to sort of fake it. If your router is 192.168.1.1 and you make the TV be 192.168.1.2. Then you could give your TV a static IP configuration and tell it that it’s subnet mask is 255.255.255.252. Then it’d only consider the IPs 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.2 as being in it’s local network and if it tries to access something else on the LAN then it’ll send it to the router for forwarding.

I’m not sure what your router would do in that situation, but it seems unlikely it’d manage to forward that packet. You’d have to avoid putting any device on 192.168.1.3 (as that’d be the routers broadcast address) but I think you could probably make that work. It’s not really secure (as anyone that compromises the TV could change the subnet) and it’d still be possible for devices on your network to send UDP packets (but not get replies from) the TV. It’s also not really extendable and you probably can’t get a second TV to work like that (and definitely not three), but it wouldn’t require switching to commercial routers.

Slackware was my first distro too, probably around 95 i think as I got a CDR copy from a friend in high school. It’s certainly not been my daily driver for that whole period, but I think I’ve probably at least had a linux system operational for nearly 30 years.

I’ve been using Windows since maybe 92 and MacOS since 86. I think Solaris is the only other OS I’ve used a significant amount. There days I’ve got a Macbook Pro for work, Windows 10 for photo editing and Kubuntu Jammy for everything else.

About 45W for my router, fiber endpoint, switch, three wireless APs and a Pi4 running Home Assistant. I’ve got a synology running separately that I suspect uses more, but I haven’t measured it recently. Thinking about putting the synology in the crawlspace as it’s kinda loud.