... and now for something completely different

[Constantin]

Once I get my cpu back, I may even manage to fix some of the odd image rotations here. Apologies for that, the images display correctly on my phone.

once frilly lizard is semi complete, we’ll wheel it into position so that the head is one one side of the path to the house and the body is on the other. Too bad we won’t be able to hand out treats this year. IIRC, the local city council has already banned trick or treating.

 

[Constantin]

Ok, more rain and even two inches of snow at the end. Lots of pointy bits got smushed, but the body and the tarps held.

Rolled the lizard into place and attached the frills, tongue, and skeleton. Lots of slipping and sliding due to snow but the hardened ground made moving the lizard a lot easier than when the grass was super soggy.

this is what it ended up looking like at night.

The skeleton does a good job of distracting the eye re: the terrible transition job I did for the frills into the head.

I would have done more to paint it but I lost 6 hours in the morning due to the boiler failing overnight. If anyone in the Boston area has a vitodens WB2B 35 controller handy, I’ll be happy to buy it!

 

[Constantin]

Ok, I apparently missed an update last year due to being a bit busy. We built a trevenant, which is a tree like Pokémon. The claws barely fit out the door, and the main body consisted of two pieces. It was pretty happy on the front lawn but I didn't have time to incorporate guy wires. That turned out to be a fatal mistake as very high winds were forecast two days after halloween. With a soggy ground and only one pole holding the thing up (the legs are pure decoration), I made the decision to take it down the day before the wind storm.

 

[Constantin]

Come spring, the school wanted a to host a fair, so I built a bumblebee for the funhouse, whose theme was insects.

I had meant to convert it to a SEABEE eventually as an appeal to raise $$$ for the Ukrainian education system but I was too busy.

 

[Constantin]

Come fall, it was time for a normal fair / fun house, but the theme was farm / fall, so in my laziness I simply converted the bumblebee body into a giant jack o lantern by adding gourd ridges, a face, and a new paint job. Despite the lowered work necessary, it still was hairy as the constant rain early in October made my life miserable. The base coat (fire ant red) went on two days before the fair, with all the embellishments following that into night before the fair.

 

[Constantin]

Which brings me now to this Halloween (2022). Faced with a big red jack o lantern, I was inspired to convert that into an ant butt, followed by building a new fire ant front end in the two weeks between the fair and Halloween. Thankfully, the weather mostly cooperated since the scale this year didn't allow much to be built indoors. Then there was the ongoing busy at work.

With the help of the family, friends, etc we just managed to get everything up in time. The jack o lantern face is still on the butt and offers something weird on top of my usual addition to neighborhood blight. I also recycled the eyes from the Bee for the ant and abused some of the bee leg pieces into being "feelers" for the fire ant head.

 

[Constantin]

Coming back to TrueNAS, the transition to 13.x Core was completely uneventful. I still struggle with getting a SMB share for Time Machine set up right (where it starts deleting content on its own vs. running out of space and stopping), but that is a topic for a different thread.

 

[Ericloewe]

How have I missed this thread for the past two years?

 

[jgreco]

I don't know, but it makes me ashamed of how boring I am.

 

[Ericloewe]

I don't know, but it makes me ashamed of how boring I am.

I know, right?

 

[Constantin]

So guys contribute so much... I just contribute to neighborhood blight!

In another lesson you guys wouldn't have to learn, I managed to bork my entire home IT setup for two days. It started with a balky Edgerouter POE 5, which have a reputation for failing flash memory. I didn't have the time to open it up yet, extract the USB drive, replace, re-image, etc. and besides, I had a Mikrotik RB4011 I wanted to try out. And while I'm at it, why not also replace the Airport Extremes with Ubiquiti U6's, and change the local IP ranges also to allow for a better allocation of IP address resources.

Not too surprising, but a lot of stuff simply broke. I should have done this in small incremental steps and then troubleshooted vs. a big conversion.

Mikrotik RouterOS is even less user-friendly than Ubiquiti EdgeOS, and that's a pretty tough one to beat. I still don't have all the firewall rules in place that I want, this will take time. Given the rudimentary blocking technology available to the Edgerouter (denying casual VPN use, blocking Youtube in its many permutations, etc.) but not to the Mikrotik, I may return to the Edgerouter. The ER12, whenever it becomes available again, is likely my next choice as it offers 2 SFP ports, which is perfect for ESD protection to a WISP outdoors while offering a second one to the main SFP+ switch.

The Ubiquiti AP ecosystem is a weird attempt at creating an apple like walled garden while missing out on the user friendly. Requiring a cloud key just to host something more complex than a single network is simply incongruent.

Similarly having to specify a IP range for the main IP network instead of being able to just use the APs as bridges is simply odd. So, I am not impressed with Cloudkey at all. Apple did a much better job re: setting up simple systems generations ago. Yes, the cloud key can be emulated on a VM, Raspberry Pi, etc. but that's not the point. I want nothing more complicated than a Guest network and a Main network, why does cloud key have to get in the way?

Getting some of the SFP+ connections wrong by inserting the wrong transceivers added hours of fun as I tried to discern why the server was now isolated. Speaking of which, the web interface on the server is now also borked because the step ca script is crashing and leaving the wrong file in its place. That issue is likely due to the IP range change / rearrangement of IP allocations here (the step CA IP address changed accordingly)

So, I finally wised up and put the U6s back out to pasture, got the mikrotik running (including the new IP allocations) and am now slowly getting the firewall exceptions / closures setup.

I am starting to think it might make more sense to use Let's encrypt with my publicly-hosted website rather than deal with the home-built CA server. It also should make it easier for the various devices (router, switches, pi-holes, etc.) to get certifications.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

I heard about Microtik out of China and that they have some great features and some shortcomings; for the price people tend to "overlook" the shortcomings. They seem better suited to making simple switches with non-complex web management interface (compared to CISCO) than routers.

In my opinion, and clearly it's just one opinion, China is known neither for security or error handling code.

 

[jgreco]

I heard about Microtik out of China and that they have some great features and some shortcomings; for the price people tend to "overlook" the shortcomings. They seem better suited to making simple switches with non-complex web management interface (compared to CISCO) than routers.

Except Mikrotik's actually out of Latvia. Their products are not high end sports cars. If you are looking for a high end sports car, you will think them to be Yugo's. But they have all the basic stuff down.

From a message over at https://www.truenas.com/community/t...ion-as-video-editing-server.88832/post-616662

Mikrotik sent me an eval unit of their eight port unit at my request.

I promised them only to say what I thought about the thing, bad or good. I was very impressed given the price point, it showed subtle signs that someone who actually used and deployed networking gear had had a hand in the design.

It is not comparable to my nice Force10 and Dell PowerConnect switchgear. But you wouldn't expect it to be competitive with gear that cost near five figures.

It stands up well to (and generally outshines) the SOHO and SMB Netgear stuff that I feel it is most comparable to, and I say that despite one of my businesses being a Netgear Powershift Partner.

I think the worst thing I can say about it is that the metal can is flimsier than a Netgear's. I have a more detailed discussion of the thing somewhere on the forums but I'm not seeing it right now.

For a home user looking to set up a small low power lab and wanting to go all 10G, it is at the top of my list of things I'd be considering. It's definitely a contender for small business uses as well, though I guess I start to get just a little concerned and might want to have a spare handy. That's still an entirely reasonable concession given the price point.

 

[Etorix]

Can we report going off-topic in the "Off-topic" sub-forum?
This thread was initially about Constantin's avatar and his other wonderful Halloween displays.

There are on-topic sections to discuss network gear.

 

[jgreco]

There are on-topic sections to discuss network gear.

There actually aren't.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

I get flagged on a tech forum for talking tech in the Off-Topic forum ...go figure.
...which in this case is the proper forum to talk this particular tech...and it's actually on-topic as the OP brought the subject up...

Except Mikrotik's actually out of Latvia. Their products are not high end sports cars. If you are looking for a high end sports car, you will think them to be Yugo's. But they have all the basic stuff down.

From a message over at https://www.truenas.com/community/t...ion-as-video-editing-server.88832/post-616662

Edit: Thank you @jgreco, it's MikroTik, not a tiny flea like micro-tick.

I noticed from your link (to the video post in the General section) the label MicroTik, whereas the products being sold that come directly from China are Microtik (small t), is there a difference? Are they the same brand? I deal with Chinese knock-offs regularly in my [almost] professional life, so am wondering if they copied MicroTik and went direct to the public or it's all the same and somehow the brand name got maligned.

Side note: Last year MicroTik routers had a bit of an issue, though so have larger brands.


About Latvia, by MicroTik (so it's on topic?):

MikroTik lounge: guide to Latvia, ep. 1

Latvia celebrates its 104th birthday, and we invite you to celebrate with us!Music by Obscurus Orbis (paldies jums!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHXYtx7...

www.youtube.com

 

[Ericloewe]

The uppercase T is a silly branding thing that I'm sure means something to whoever came up with it, but is generally ignored by the rest of humanity.
The Made in China thing is, alas, little different from much of the industry. They do have some products that are assembled in Europe, which is a step in the right direction.

Side note: Last year MicroTik routers had a bit of an issue,

IIRC, that was for wildly out of date software, configured for WAN access to the WebGUI (Who does that? And how can I sell them a short book explaining to them that they should not do it?).
Overall, not a story that I felt was impactful. Just another day ending in "y".

 

[jgreco]

the label MicroTik, whereas the products being sold that come directly from China are Microtik (small t), is there a difference?

It's Mikrotik with two K's. It looks like it is also currently stylized with a capital T, although I've frequently seen it "Mikrotik" without the cap T.

I would be a bit concerned by China. From what I've seen, MikroTik's products ship from Latvia (for a demo unit I asked them for), or from one of several US distributors. China is probably asking for trouble. Buy from a well established US distributor like Baltic or Flytec.

 

[Constantin]

Some SuperMicro motherboards are made in China as well as Taiwan and they are among the highest-volume selling server motherboards out there. Bloomberg made a big deal out of this, claiming that China had buried components inside the PCB or substituted something nefarious on the outside to allow China easier means of penetrating a laundry list of western data centers. No one, to my limited knowledge, has yet come up with a verified example in the press. Not saying it hasn't happened (just as the NSA doctored equipment being shipped abroad).

Where Edgerouter and Mikrotik differ is the ease of use. To some extent, the built-in wizards and some guides allow Edgerouters to be set up more easily by the average homeowner than Mikrotik for simple SOHO tasks like simple router, simple router with 2 WANs, and so on.

Mikrotik is much closer to the metal and there literally are hundreds of options that you can go explore (and lock up your router with). But, unlike Edgerouter, there isn't a weird cliff between the relatively benign GUI to get something set up and the CLI / config tree that you eventually get to drop down into as you explore fun stuff like site-to-site VPN networks, where the Edgerouter wizard simply is not ready for prime time. Never mind how RouterOS can handle far greater # of VPN types than Edgerouter natively.

That's not to say that Ubiquiti makes junk, but their focus has increasingly become one of presenting a slick UI with animations and like "enhancements", a limited set of user-selectable options (see Cloud Key), etc. all while producing some very impressive wireless hardware, such as the U6 series of APs. So, I'm sticking with UBNT for the wireless portion of the network and Mikrotik with the switches and the router.

 

[danb35]

Requiring a cloud key just to host something more complex than a single network is simply incongruent.

Since when do you need a Cloud Key? You need the controller software, sure, but that can run in a jail under FreeBSD/TNCore, or an app under SCALE, or in a VM of your preference under either or your hypervisor of choice, or a spare Raspberry Pi if you happen to have one of those, or...

So, I'm sticking with UBNT for the wireless portion of the network and Mikrotik with the switches and the router.

...or you could look at Ruckus (likely used) for both:

Brocade ICX Series (cheap & powerful 10gbE/40gbE switching)

NOTE #1: do not PM me with switch questions, they will be ignored - post them in this public thread, where hundreds of other members can also answer, and the answer will be public for future users NOTE #2 06-22-2023: Yes, this post is still up to date and nothing has changed: in fact judging by...

forums.servethehome.com

Ruckus Wireless as an Unifi alternative?

The recent Unifi product decisions have me starting to debate changing my wireless network here at home, and in searching around Ruckus seems to keep bubbling to the top of alternatives. Does anyone have any recent, first hand experience they can share? A few questions/comments below: From...

forums.servethehome.com