Tag: data

Home Ethernet and Wi-Fi

Nick Momrik1 Comment

A big part of the planning for our house included Ethernet wiring because I want to hardwire every device I can, saving the Wi-Fi for devices that require it. It’s much easier and cheaper to get everything wired during the build, instead of adding later. I went through several iterations of the plan and in the end I had the electricians do 42 runs of Cat6:

  • 4 jacks in the office
  • 2 jacks in the office closet
  • 2 jacks in the pocket office
  • 2 jacks in the guest bedroom
  • 4 jacks behind the TV
  • 2 jacks in the living room
  • 2 jacks in the dining room
  • 2 jacks in the pantry
  • 2 jacks in the laundry room
  • 4 jacks in the walk in closet
  • 6 jacks in the master bedroom
  • 10 wires to 5 exterior camera locations (1 extra at each location)

They run it all up through the ceiling. I’m guessing that is to keep it away from most of the electrical. Here’s the master bedroom nightstand wiring as an example.

Then all of the cables comes over and down a wall between the laundry room and garage.

Ending at a single location in the basement.

We built a wall (part 1 & 2) and since we moved in back in August I’d had the cable modem and old eero router sitting on top of the network rack filled with new equipment.

Last December I added some supports to the rack and couple of weeks ago I built a cart. Then I moved the modem and router inside.

Throughout the house, I put port covers on the unused jacks. Here’s how a wall plate looks with one port open and one covered. The covers will help protect the internals and keep dust out.

What did I buy for my network? A LOT! Here’s all of the stuff for the rack, cables, and tools.

When it came to the actual networking equipment I took a good look at the stuff from Ubiquiti/UniFi. It’s top of the line, which is reflected by the price tag. I decided to go with TP-Link instead, saving a lot of money.

Before I started wiring everything through the rack, I cleaned up the cables.

The electricians had done all of the wall jacks throughout the house with the newer T-568B wiring standard, so I followed suit. I learned how to wire the keystone jacks and insert them in to the patch panels.

I’d never done anything like this and it was so much fun. By the end, I was pretty quick with each keystone jack. I highly recommend the Everest 45° ones and the tool for it. The basement needed some Ethernet ports for the golf sim, so I ran four new cables from the rack. I installed a couple of electrical boxes in the ceiling and wired jacks there.

I also needed a custom length Ethernet cable to run from the ceiling jack down to the gaming PC. I’d tried putting RJ45 jacks on the end of an Ethernet cable or two a long time ago and remember it being almost impossible. After watching a quick YouTube video (even though I don’t have pass through connectors), I was able to put both ends on my new cable without a problem and it passed the test.

Then I was able to use patch cables to connect ports on the patch panel to the switch as well as hook up the cable modem, Pi-hole Raspberry Pi, and TP-Link equipment. There’s also a Dell Micro in there, which I’ll cover in a later post about smart home.

When I tried to access the Omada controller I couldn’t bring up the web interface with Chrome on my Mac. After trying a bunch of stuff I checked from my iPhone and it worked. I tried Safari on my Mac which also worked. It turned out I had always prevented Chrome from accessing my local network. I flipped the switch in System Settings and the interface loaded.

At another point I accidentally disabled all of the ports on the switch. The UI splits the switch ports across three pages, and on page two I had clicked the button to select all, unselected a port, and disabled the nine other ports. I quickly realized it disabled 27 of the 28 ports. I was so pissed! Every other UI I’ve ever used will only select the items in view when you click the Select All button, but not the Omada Controller software. In order to get back in I had to access the switch via the USB console, reset the switch to factory settings, and start over.

I’m running four VLANs, named Default, Guest, IoT, and nIoT. IoT is for my Internet of Things (smart home) devices that need to access the Internet and the “n” in nIoT stands for “not” since I don’t want them to access the Internet. The Default and IoT networks are set to get their DNS from my Pi-hole server, which blocks ads and other malicious domains.

Each VLAN has a matching wireless network. The Guest Wi-Fi is set as a guest network, which automatically prevents any device from accessing another. The wireless networks for IoT and nIoT are only set to use the 2.4 GHz band since most of the devices will not work on 5 GHz.

I added mDNS rules for Printers and AirPlay devices from the IoT network to the Default network.

It took me awhile to figure out the ACL rules. I have two for the Gateway. The first prevents any outside IP from accessing my network management page and the second prevents the nIoT network from accessing the Internet.

I ended up with six rules for the switch, since the default behavior of the Omada stuff is to permit everything. With my Pi-hole server on the IoT network I had to allow it’s IP to access anything on the Default network (this should probably be limited to specific ports). I had to allow some ports from the camera IPs to access the Default network and I had to allow some ports from my Home Assistant server to access the Default network. I may find out I need to adjust those ACLs, but more on those smart home aspects in a future post. Then the IoT and nIoT networks are denied from accessing Default and a bi-directional rule prevents the Guest network from accessing any other network.

Seems to be running pretty well. I have some smart home stuff on the network, but haven’t connected any of the light switches yet and have a lot of Home Assistant configuration to do. Originally I didn’t have an access point in the basement, but after a few days realized it was necessary and added one. Here’s a view of the network topology, automatically generated by the Omada controller.

If you upload a floor plan and place walls, the software can even run a wireless coverage simulation. The house has great signal and the yard should get good connections as well.

Power over Ethernet is pretty sweet. It’s so nice not needing power cables for the 10 devices with PoE support.

Time to finish setting up my server and smart home devices. Watch for an upcoming post with all of the details.

% Better/Worse

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This showed up in my Facebook memories this morning and I quickly shared it.

tiny-gainz

Then I thought about it for a minute and the scale on the chart seemed out of whack, so I deleted the post. I opened up a Google spreadsheet and started messing with numbers. Here’s what a real chart looks like if you improve by 1% each day.

1-percent-changes

What does this really show though? If the starting number 1 represents your current ability in some skill, the end result is your ability in that skill. So if you improved by 1% each day, at the end of a year your skill level would be over 37x what it currently is. Conversely if you got 1% worse each day, at the end of a year you’d be left with about 2.5% of your original ability. I can’t think of any skill where either that much of an improvement or decline is possible by any stretch of the imagination.

What about 0.1% changes though?

tenth-of-percent-changes

If you got 0.1% better each day for a year, your skill level would improve by 44% and if you got 0.1% worse each day you’d be left with just under 70% of your ability. Now we’re getting somewhere realistic!

It’s still hard to grasp what that means though, with 1 representing some ability or skill level. To put this in perspective, I’ll use the time it takes to run a mile. Starting with a 10 minute mile on day one makes it easy to understand.

If you run 1% faster each day, you’d have to run a 15.5 second mile at the end of the year. Good luck!

If you run 0.1% faster each day, you’d be running a mile in 6:56 at the end of the year. That’s seems possible doesn’t it?

Historical Currency Exchange Rates

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Usually when I need to get a bunch of past exchange rates I use the GOOGLEFINANCE function in Google Spreadsheets. Something like this…

=GOOGLEFINANCE("EUR", "price", DATE(2016,1,1), TODAY(), "DAILY")

It’s quick and easy, but once in a while you’ll run into a currency where this doesn’t return enough precision, compared to the value you get when using Google’s currency converter. Even worse, today it was giving me a bunch of data that was quite different from what Google Finance showed for the current and historical data.

I found a site run by the University of British Columbia that’ll give you whatever data you need. It’s not pretty but it does the job. Those Canadians are always so generous!

Performancing Metrics

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Performancing came out with a free public beta of a blog tracking service earlier this week, called Performancing Metrics. I haven’t used it a very much yet, but it looks very promising. Most statistics services and packages are bloated with useless data. PM gives bloggers access to the data they’ll need most often and it works great. The site responds quickly and stats are updated every hour. Best of all…you can track multiple blogs from one account!

Backup

Nick Momrik1 Comment

I just read a very interesting article by Vince Barnes of HTML Goodies.

Three Golden Rules

Intriguing title, don’t you think? We’ll get to them in just a second. First, let’s take a quick look at the “coming to life” of your website.

Imagine if you will, all the thought that goes into a website; then the work involved in it’s actual creation; the care with which its various elements are interconnected; and the pride with which it is placed onto a web server and published for the world to see.

Next, a little time goes by and the site evolves with a tweak here, add a page there, put a database link in this, and so on. Pretty soon the site has grown a lot and represents its developer’s blood, sweat and tears. Then the server crashes and the call comes in from hosting company to say “sorry, you’ll have to upload your pages again.” Pages? PAGES? WHAT PAGES? The horror dawns on you that your only copy is that original set that you first created. All that extra work was done after that upload and was added piece by piece to the live site. Only the live site had it all. And that database of contact information you’ve been collecting — it was up there too!

Now to those golden rules. They apply to everything to do with computers, but we’re especially interested in how they apply to website creation and maintenance. I’m sure you’ve guessed the first part by now. That’s right — Backup!

Rule number one is backup your stuff! When you make a copy, however, things can go wrong with the copy process. It’s a good idea to make a copy of your existing backup before you start to copy over it — just in case! Now you have a one generation old copy and a current copy.

Then there’s Murphy’s Law. “If it can go wrong it will. If it can’t go wrong, it’ll go wrong quicker.” (If that’s not actually Murphy’s Law, I’m sure he’d be pretty proud of it anyway!) Here’s the scene (it’s based on the last one): as your hanging up the phone after the call from the hosting company a knowing smile stretches itself across your face; “I have those two copies in the other room – let me get one and send it up,” you think to yourself. As you do, and as if in direct response to your smirk, a bolt of lightning comes out of the blue, smashes its way through your roof, through the back room, through your computer and melts your CDs and floppies as it goes.

Oops! (Thank goodness it missed the cat – this is, after all, a family style newsletter!)

Yes, that’s right — you should have made another copy and kept it at work or in your safe deposit box. An off-site copy is another very reasonable backup. Of course, its possible that the call comes from the hosting company, a bolt takes out your PC and a flash flood washes away the bank. If this happens to you, you might want to examine your life a little – the universe seems to be exceptionally mad at you.

So, more correctly stated, rule one would be “backup your backups.” That would leave rule two as “backup your stuff” and rule three as “backup your stuff again and keep the backup off-site.” The short form of the three golden rules is:

Backup backup; backup; and backup again.

Say that to yourself a few times. Now ask yourself “did I just say that, or have I actually done it?”

-Vince Barnes

Working for a Support Center, I see people losing data/files all the time because they didn’t have a backup copy. I have no sympathy for these people. I know that when I have something important, I always keep several copies of it. I’ll keep a copy at home, at work, on a CD, in my email…anywhere I can think of. Maybe someday people will learn their lesson.