Michael P. O'Connor

With the shutdown of the Sony PSP, Vita, and PS3 store. Also with places like facebag and twatter banning conservatives a lot. And finding that google does over tracking (see my post where I found that to use google drive it goes though one of their analytic sites instead) I have been thinking of what data I let others have control over and what data I have full control over now. While I can not pull that data back from google, or others I can control some of the data in the future. So instead of putting my data for contacts and calendar data on google anymore (the google apps via android) I decided I would look back at some older tech to keep this data and keep more personal control over this data. So I found on eBay an old palm 3e. I use to have one back in the 90’s (it was my first PDA ever) So I picked it up. looking at moving my data into the palm. I am still waiting on a USB to serial adapter so I can use it on my Linux box with JPilot. I have imported my contacts from my phone to JPilot already. There is not much in the calendar so I don’t need to import that data.

I was surprised how fast I remembered the old “graffiti” input style, but it was easy to remember and still almost second nature. I am starting to take more control over my data, instead of surrendering it to google and others. Also with using Pi-Hold to block all facebook URLs and twitter URLs, and many google tracking URLs, I can help keep the tracking down too. Until I can find a good search engine that is not google I can not block all of google’s URLs yet. Sadly DuckDuckGo does not seem to fit that need, and Bing don’t make me laugh.

I have never been a fan of web mail. So I still use local mail clients. Right now I am trying a new mail client on my system, it is claw-mail. It seems to be working out well, there are a few more things I would like to get setup in it, but so far it looks like it will fit my needs. I have gotten it setup to handle html mail, sadly it seems EVERYONE sends email in HTML instead of plain text which is just stupid, if more email was just plain text I could get away with just plain pine, but since the stupidity of sending email in encoded html you are forced to deal with it, or have unreadable email.

Well with the news of the new cyber security issue facing the US that came out today. See here While I am confident that where I work has things in place to help prevent this, one can never be to paranoid. So to protect my home network just in case, I setup a VLAN for my work computer (VLAN 10) I have blocked both ways, devices on my home network can not access the “work” network I setup on VLAN 10, nor can devices (well just device, the work laptop) on the “work” network can not access my home network. I have a drop from work lan -> home lan and also a drop from home lan -> work lan. With 2 more rules, requests to my DNS server only on port 53 from work lan -> home lan, and an Allow Estabished and Related rule so that if a request is made the DNS server can respond. I have tested if I can connect to my work place’s VPN (that all I really care about for the work laptop to connect to, as once that in place all traffic from the laptop goes to my work place) So now from my work laptop I can not ping any IP on my home network, nor can I ping my work laptop from my home network.

This should 1) protect my home network just in case (I doubt it will happen) and 2) if my home network gets compromised (I also doubt this will happen) it should help protect my work system from it. Also to go with this, my guest WiFi network is also off of either of these 2 network, so if I have a guest over that has a compromised devices (this is my biggest fear, as not all my friends are tech savy) it will not be on either my home network nor my work network.

This is the core of my network, Here you will see at the top my Unifi USG router, with the main WAN going out to my Verizon FioS modem, and the second WAN going out to a WiFi access point, that connects to my T-Mobile Hotspot as a fail over in case my Verizon connection goes down.

Next to the WiFi access point is a hard drive that is connected to a Pi that serves not only as a SMB server (for my local NAS) but that same Pi also serves as my DHCP server and the VPN endpoint into my home network when I am out and about (if we ever can leave our homes again) Above that Pi is another Pi that serves as a DNS server (Pi-Hole) and the Unifi Controller server.

Also you see on the wall there my main switch that has 3 lines going out, on to “Desk 2” to distribute the network into my computer room, one goes to the bed room to send out the network to the bedroom, and the third one goes out to the living room to distribute the network out there.

Also you will see the USB drive is not plugged directly into the Pi, as it could not put enough power to the USB drive so it goes into a powered USB hub, then to the Pi.

And there is the core of my home network, and yes it a mess and no cable managment.

Since I have played around with the NAS, I had the thought I should share out my main data directory on my main computer, and then mount them on all my computers. This way I don’t have to worry about scp the file over do the work and then scp it back. This way I can just have my document directory mounted on all my Linux boxes, and if I need to work with a file, it is already “on” the computer and when I save it will be saved over at the main computer’s file system. I just had to set the “owner” of the files when I mount it on all the other Linux boxes. Took a little bit of work today, but it might save me time in the future, as no need to copy files back and forth.

Along with the other backups I do of my data; I use SpiderOak for off sight, and also sync it with MS one drive [Yes Linux data being synced to OneDrive], I also take a tar.gz backup of it, and store in the local computer, then scp a copy of it to a file server on my network, also I sync the one drive down to another computer. I am now going to do a nightly rsync of the data directory to the NAS I setup. I know maybe I am doing to many backups of the data, but I want to be sure if something happens to my data I can have a chance of getting it back. I will also being coping a copy of my nightly backup tar.gz files up the the NAS.

The funny part is I could have uploaded it to the cloud faster then doing the init sync of the data to the NAS, while in the long run it will not mater, now it is going slower as the Raspberry Pi only has a 10/100Mbit Ethernet port, so it will take longer to load the full 1.3TB to the NAS. Funny as I could upload to the internet in half the time as I tend to get upload speeds of 200Mbits when uploading to the internet now, I have seen as high as 500Mbits, but 200Mbits is about the average I seen.

I have 2 Raspberry Pis (as I have talked about a lot and they are doing network services for me) I am not using m the external hard drive I had attached to my PS4 Pro a while back so I cleaned up games from it, and also from the external drive that I will not be playing anymore on the PS4, especially since I have the PS5, and the PSVR is attached to the PS5. I was able to free enough room up on both the internal and exernal drive, that I am able to move all the games still on the PS4 to the internal drive. So I am going to format it and attach it to on of the Raspberry Pis and turn it into a 2TB NAS drive. The work I am doing on my home network is making it look almost professional. Firewalls, WiFi Mesh network, custom DHCP, in house DNS sever to both fillter out ads/malware sites and get updates from the DHCP server so I can connect to local boxes via a name and not just an IP address. Now I will have a nice little NAS (2TB) setup to go with all of this. Some of this is just repurposeing older hardware.