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       Stardate: 20211223.1402
       Location: Foxy's
       Input Device: Gemini PDA
       Audio: Restaurant patrons
       Visual: A-frame restaurant, holiday decor
       Emotional State: wet, warming up, present
       
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       It has been raining here and cold (for SoCal) and I decided to stop
       at one of the family restaurants I enjoy for some breakfast and 
       shelter.  I always enjoy when we do get some weather here since we
       don't get much and it is a nice change.  I grew up with frequent 
       weather changes and when it does happen, it brings me to the now and
       I am able to observe more than I would otherwise.
       
       Lately, I have been revisiting pi-hole[1] on my network.  It is 
       basically an ad blocker/DNS server for the local network that runs on 
       minimal resources.  I was running it on a Raspberry Pi before, but 
       ended up repurposing the hardware for another project and running ad
       blocking software locally on my computers.  
       
       Since I have been messing around with my home network, I decided to
       run pi-hole in a virtual machine and have the devices use pi-hole
       for DNS.  I had forgotten how much ad and "telemetry-related" 
       traffic happens on my network.  Even more so now with the rest of 
       the family's devices.  I was surprised how much chatter happens.   
       
       One of the devices that showed up quickly due to its chatter is the 
       Roku box.  Man, that thing must be homesick with all the calls it
       keeps trying to make back to the mothership.  
       
       I keep this device, along with the smart TV and the blu-ray player 
       on its own network segment with its own hardware router.  
       Previously, it was behind an old ASUS wifi router (wifi disabled) 
       which ran the last version of tomato firmware[2] from 2010.  
       Since both were old, I repurposed an old, but a little newer 
       TP-Link wifi router with a fairly recent version of dd-wrt.[3]
       These old routers seem to work out fine, especially with the wifi
       turned off.  I have had no problems with the ASUS router and the
       old tomato running almost 24/7 over the years. 
       
       It turns out that I can repurpose the ASUS, yet again!  After 
       putting the TP-Link in place, I searched around for any other 
       options for the ASUS router and it looks like the community has
       forked tomato to a custom firmware called FreshTomato![4]  I
       look forward to tinkering with this in the near future!
       
       It's really nice that pi-hole and other tools make it so easy to 
       view the statistics in a user-friendly web front end.  It sure beats 
       trying to parse log files manually or slice and dice the data in a 
       spreadsheet like back in the day.  That was so time consuming and the 
       data was usually static.  Now I can see the stats in real time and 
       spend more time sleuthing and less time data mining!  
       
       I keep my home network segmented with a mix of VLANS and physical 
       routers to segregate my servers and various devices.  Sometimes it
       can be quite a chore to manage all of this.  I've been trying to 
       brainstorm a way to aggregate all of the devices, dashboards, config
       tools, etc.  Before, the way I would deal with this was to just 
       have a handmade static HTML document with local URLs, notes, 
       IP addresses, etc. (yeah, I'm old school and I like banging rocks
       together.)  I'm sure there are better free and open-source tools 
       out there these days.  One that I have been looking at is called
       cockpit[5] but I have only started doing the research.  
       
       How do you people in the community manage all of your network 
       devices at home?  I'd be interested to know!  Feel free to send me a 
       message at xiled[at]sdf[dot]org.
       
       Much gratitude to the community and the developers who enable me 
       to continue using old hardware and have powerful, open source tools! 
       
       
       [1] https://pi-hole.net/
       
       [2] http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/
       
       [3] https://dd-wrt.com/
       
       [4] http://freshtomato.org/
       
       [5] https://cockpit-project.org/
       
       
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