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!