State of the Network - April 2024

Lately I have been working some electronics projects, genealogy, and really haven’t had time to really work on my HomeLab.  Sensing that I haven’t posted for some time I thought I might post about the HomeLabs current condition.  While I am working on the electronics projects most of the equipment is turned off.  In fact, I normally have only the Edgerouter-12 and the Netgear M4100-26g turned on since my laptop is pretty much permanently connected to the Server Admin vlan. So here are some bullit points  to explain where the HomeLab sits:

• I now have a managed switch at the top of the rack to connect to the outside (powered on with the rack)
• I have pushed the two Edgerouter-X routers and one managed switch into the back of the rack with their ports coming out to the front
• I now have a 24 port patch panel that connects to some ports on the top 24 port patch panel, the two ER-Xs, the managed switch, and to the 5 input ports on the Proxmox server
• I can now power the xPod, Monitor Network, Proxmox server, some specific rack RPis, and the ER-12/M4100-26g separately
• The external managed switch behind the rack has been wired differently to accomodate the changes and additional experiments on the HomeLab table
• I now have two LED strips on the front of the rack to illuminate the patch wiring
• I also have two LED strips under my laptop holder on the HomeLab table to illuminate electronic circuits on the table
• I have incorporated an UAP-AC-AD to output four specific vlan connections; one of which goes to my development vlan

These are items that I have changed but I still have items that I haven’t implemented yet. My thoughts about what I want keep changing as I come up with other ideas.  So here are some future items that I want to implement:

• I recently obtained an Edgerouter-12P which will provide POE capability in the rack and beyond; I need to determine how I will use it
• I also obtained a couple of UAP-AP-LR WAPs which I hope to use to form a wi-fi link to the back bedroom (I am unable to get an Ethernet cable pulled from the living room to my back bedroom) because the Power adapters only give me 130 Mbps throughput.
• I hope to spin up two RPi Zero Ws at opposite ends of the Ethernet over power link to monitor failures
• I hope to spin up a RPi 4B in the living room as a PiHole to be the definition of connections within my network
• I hope to be able to use my SLATE router, connected to a 2.4 GHz wi-fi connection as a fall over from the FLINT router
• I also hope to figure out how to integrate Midi into my HomeLab including a new Zynthian Synthisizer on an RPi 3B+

What is the makeup of my network and how would it fail?

 I can look at my network as being in three pieces: Front of Network (FON), Middle of Network (MON), and Back of Network (BON).  Really the breakup (and notes on failure) is as follows:

• middle of network (MON): RPi1/SW118 -> AV2000 -> power wires -> AV2000 -> SW116/RPi2
• power might go out; UPS would only last for a few minutes; how would this be logged?
• power hicup might cause AV2000 to break connection and have to be reset - how would I know this?
• front of network (FON): FLINT / SLATE / media equip.
• FON might go down if FLINT / SLATE are not connected
• possible that FLINT or SLATE might not be connected but other one is
• moving some vlans for fall over to FLINT / SLATE might help
• power might go out; UPS would only last for a few minutes
• back of network (BON): Laptop / Rack / monitor / table experiments / printer
• rack is on its own UPS; power failure should cause rack to turn itself off - how would this be logged?
• Laptop is on same UPS as MON; but could remove and work independently, monitor would not be useful

I was also thinking that I might add a couple of RPis to the mix to complete some of the monitoring / logging / sensing functions:

• RPi1: could be used to monitor FON and part of MON
• would be in charge of logging and notification
• could monitor network condition in living room
• RPi2: could be used to monitor part of MON and BON
• would be in charge of logging and notification
• could monitor network condition in back bedroom

This seems like a reasonable approach to being able to increase my redundancy / monitoring as a necessary component of the network.

Project #32 - Setup Redundancy/Fallover in the Network

 I got to thinking about how my network is connected and realized that I don't have a way of reducing the outages or recording what has happened.  I have a project that was supposed to tell me the condition of the WiFi connections at any one time, but I don't use that information in any sense.  I also don't have a way for the front of the network to know what the back of the network is doing and vice versa. I don't have a graceful way to shut things down if the network fails from some external problem (mainly power outages which happen from time to time here).  WiFi outages also happen from time to time but they are less important since the backend of my network is mainly for hobby purposes.

Fallover is not apparent in the current setup of my network.  Is that important to me?  It depends on what I am doing at the moment.  If I am wood carving, not at all.  If I am working on an electronic circuit, also not important.  But if I am online how do I keep online without a problem.  I could switch from one network type to another, but is that efficient?  So a number of questions come to mind:

• first of all, what is missing from my network?
• how would the front fail as opposed to the middle and back?
• if the front goes down, how would I know?
• if the middle goes down how would I know?
• does it matter if the back is completely off?
• how can I keep my laptop in the back always available?
• is there a fall over that I can count on?
• can I log what is happening with the network? where?
• how does WiFi from other apartments into bedroom play into this?
• how do I detect how good of a connection I have?
• can I separate out living room from back bedroom?
• would it be profitable to switch AV2000s with a WiFi mesh connnection?
• could the AP-HD be used in a WiFi mesh configuration?

Project #31 - Integrate Midi Devices into the HomeLab

 I have decided that I also want to include Midi into my HomeLab.  I already possess many Midi devices that are currently gathering dust in my electronics bins.  Electronic music is the thing that got me into Electronic Music in the beginning.  I have drifted far from my music roots and need to come back to make up for lost time.  So in the offing I have decided to start integrating keyboards, synthesizers, Arduino/ESP32 based Midi controllers, etc into the mix.

An Alternative Setup for the WWD RPi

I have found an alternative item to use as the basis for the Web Weather Display (WWD).  I found some code for a Weatherflow PiConsole that uses information from my Tempest to display current conditions.  Chief URLs are as follows:

• https://community.weatherflow.com/t/weatherflow-piconsole/1933
• https://github.com/peted-davis/WeatherFlow_PiConsole
• https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/config_txt.html#lcd-displays-and-touchscreens

I am proposing to use this code as a starting place for the WWD and then work out the mechanism for a web display later.  In this way I can get something up quickly without a lot of fuss.  I will probably use one of the RPis in my rack as the unit.