Introduction

I finally gave in an bought some managed switches. I’d been considering a UniFi USW-Pro-XG-48-PoE but its pretty expensive and I’m not a fan of the management setup with Ubiquiti kit.

Basically I need 48 ports that are faster than gigabit and a few 10gbe ports. Management is a nice extra, not really interested in PoE or fibre.

Sodola - A Customer Service Fail

So I got two Sodola 24 port 2.5gbe web-managed switches as they were a good deal on Amazon; and also from Sodola directly, their 16 port 10gbe web-managed switch - which it turns out, doesn’t actually exist and I instead received their 2.5gbe unmanaged switch which costs considerably less than I paid!

I decided I wanted to do more advanced stuff with my home network - PXE booting, DHCP options, hostname allocation, blocklists, VPN etc. Most of which meant getting rid of the BT SmartHub2, which in turn means I can’t use their Digital Voice for my landline or BTTV for Freeview, at which point I figured I may as well ditch them for mobile too!

So I looked into other FTTP providers and found Zen Full Fibre Max which offered a few upgrades - a static IPv4, a /48 IPv6, reverse DNS and 1600 mbps instead of 900.

It’s been almost 3 years since my last post it seems, so I thought I’d fire up VSCode and write something new.

I wish I hadn’t now, as I had to hack around with my Hugo theme to get it to work again!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I bought an OrangePi R1+ to use as a router for my work laptop. Well, I received it the other day and its great! It does run hot, even with the CPU/RAM heatsinks I added it hovers around 65c, that’s partially due to the case it seems, which maybe could have some more air holes. The thing is tiny - about half the length of a RPi. It manages 800mbps+ according to iperf3, so easily forwards my ~310mbps FTTP.

I’ve recently been updating various Debian Buster boxes to Bullseye. I’ve got a couple of laptops to do yet but the rest run Sid.

On my headless servers, the update mainly consisted of - make sure you’re running the latest kernel and latest Buster packages, add the new Bullseye repo’s, update, remove old packages and configs, reboot and then remove the old kernel:

apt update && apt dist-upgrade

cat << "EOF" > /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bullseye main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bullseye-updates main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye-security main
EOF

apt update
apt full-upgrade
apt dist-upgrade
apt --purge autoremove
apt purge $(dpkg -l | awk '/^rc/ { print $2 }')
apt-get clean
reboot

apt purge linux-image-4.19*

I kept all config files like sshd_config. On the desktops the main difference was adding the contrib/non-free repo’s, see also Debian’s instructions.