I’m curious about firewalls. I have a Protectli FW4B along with a backup edge router ER-X and decided to do some testing. There are a handful of different ideas I wanted to explore.

The first had to do with the value of the next-generation firewall capabilities like threat protection. Practically, it doesn’t matter that much for me, it’s just my wife and I, but I was curious if it would be a valuable thing to deploy for my mom and how difficult they would be to be useful.

I recently switched from pfSense to https://www.ipfire.org and got to learn the hoops needed for PPPoE over a vlan like Centurylink needs.

In IPFire this is considered a VDSL connection and isn’t available during the guided setup. But overall it’s a pretty easy process. You’ll need your PPPoE username and password from centurylink to get started.

During initial setup select the Dialup option (even though you are on Fiber :) ).

I’ve been using Pi-Hole for a while and it just caused too many problems. Many shopping carts across the web would just fail. I need to run google ad campaigns and you can’t get to the admin UI. Therefore I decided to move dns resolving back to my ER-X and instead use cloudflared to resolve DNS queries so CenturyLink has a harder time selling my browsing history.

I found a great post on how to do this at: https://reichley.tech/dns-over-https-edgerouter-x/ but it doesn’t cover the v2 series of EdgeOS based on Debian 9. These are my quick notes on changes to their directions.

I recently switched from pfSense to https://www.ipfire.org and got to learn the hoops needed for PPPoE over a vlan like Centurylink needs.

In IPFire this is considered a VDSL connection and isn’t available during the guided setup. But overall it’s a pretty easy process. You’ll need your PPPoE username and password from centurylink to get started.

During initial setup select the Dialup option (even though you are on Fiber :) ).

I’ve been struggling with running my radio cables through the wall. For many years I drilled some holes in the frame that held our cat door, but as you can see below, we stopped using the cat door. With the recent bout of horrible wildfire smoke here in Seattle I was forced to remove the cat door and hole up inside and was unable to use my radio. That prompted me to finally get up the courage to drill a hole in the wall of my house.

Needed and adapter to connect my vacuum to my belt sander. Tada.

These tanks are awfully tippy when connected to a Little Torch. Not so much anymore.

I’ve been struggling with running my radio cables through the wall. For many years I drilled some holes in the frame that held our cat door, but as you can see below, we stopped using the cat door. With the recent bout of horrible wildfire smoke here in Seattle I was forced to remove the cat door and hole up inside and was unable to use my radio. That prompted me to finally get up the courage to drill a hole in the wall of my house.

The performance of my satellite downlink station is nowhere near as good as I would like. I been doing some various troubleshooting measures to try and figure out what is going on. In my previous post, you can see some of my explorations about antenna tuning. In this post I took my first pass at exploring the feedline situation. It’s been up for at least five years and wanted to make sure nothing untoward had happened to it.

For my satellite ground station I built an antenna from the plans by WA5VJB http://www.wa5vjb.com/references/Cheap%20Antennas-LEOs.pdf

I originally built a 7 element 70cm antenna. But then added on a two element 2m one. While I had tuned the 70cm antenna, it was tuned a little too low after the second cut to shorten the driven element. But it passed, just barely.

While attaching the new antenna to the old, I got frustrated smacking the darn thing into everything and hacked off the end, converting it to a 5 element in short order. With years of experience under my belt I have learned that anger is not a great engineering design philosophy.

I’ve been slowly working towards building a satellite uplink and downlink station for years. I have finally reached a point where I finished building the station and have Receive some signals.

The performance is rather abysmal, I still have a fair amount of work to do.

Needed and adapter to connect my vacuum to my belt sander. Tada.

These tanks are awfully tippy when connected to a Little Torch. Not so much anymore.

Why did I decide that putting a new motor on my lathe was a good idea?

I already have many projects in process; things like figuring out why I can no longer use the heat pump register in my bedroom; landscaping the backyard and getting a tree removed; walking 50 minutes a day. But after I finished the little motor project, I was frustrated at how many times I had to switch belts.

The performance of my satellite downlink station is nowhere near as good as I would like. I been doing some various troubleshooting measures to try and figure out what is going on. In my previous post, you can see some of my explorations about antenna tuning. In this post I took my first pass at exploring the feedline situation. It’s been up for at least five years and wanted to make sure nothing untoward had happened to it.

For my satellite ground station I built an antenna from the plans by WA5VJB http://www.wa5vjb.com/references/Cheap%20Antennas-LEOs.pdf

I originally built a 7 element 70cm antenna. But then added on a two element 2m one. While I had tuned the 70cm antenna, it was tuned a little too low after the second cut to shorten the driven element. But it passed, just barely.

While attaching the new antenna to the old, I got frustrated smacking the darn thing into everything and hacked off the end, converting it to a 5 element in short order. With years of experience under my belt I have learned that anger is not a great engineering design philosophy.

The performance of my satellite downlink station is nowhere near as good as I would like. I been doing some various troubleshooting measures to try and figure out what is going on. In my previous post, you can see some of my explorations about antenna tuning. In this post I took my first pass at exploring the feedline situation. It’s been up for at least five years and wanted to make sure nothing untoward had happened to it.

For my satellite ground station I built an antenna from the plans by WA5VJB http://www.wa5vjb.com/references/Cheap%20Antennas-LEOs.pdf

I originally built a 7 element 70cm antenna. But then added on a two element 2m one. While I had tuned the 70cm antenna, it was tuned a little too low after the second cut to shorten the driven element. But it passed, just barely.

While attaching the new antenna to the old, I got frustrated smacking the darn thing into everything and hacked off the end, converting it to a 5 element in short order. With years of experience under my belt I have learned that anger is not a great engineering design philosophy.

I’ve been using Pi-Hole for a while and it just caused too many problems. Many shopping carts across the web would just fail. I need to run google ad campaigns and you can’t get to the admin UI. Therefore I decided to move dns resolving back to my ER-X and instead use cloudflared to resolve DNS queries so CenturyLink has a harder time selling my browsing history.

I found a great post on how to do this at: https://reichley.tech/dns-over-https-edgerouter-x/ but it doesn’t cover the v2 series of EdgeOS based on Debian 9. These are my quick notes on changes to their directions.

Why did I decide that putting a new motor on my lathe was a good idea?

I already have many projects in process; things like figuring out why I can no longer use the heat pump register in my bedroom; landscaping the backyard and getting a tree removed; walking 50 minutes a day. But after I finished the little motor project, I was frustrated at how many times I had to switch belts.

Why did I decide that putting a new motor on my lathe was a good idea?

I already have many projects in process; things like figuring out why I can no longer use the heat pump register in my bedroom; landscaping the backyard and getting a tree removed; walking 50 minutes a day. But after I finished the little motor project, I was frustrated at how many times I had to switch belts.