Project #38 - Integrate the Edgerouter-12p into the Rack

 I have had an Edgerouter-12 POE router in my toolbox for a long time.  It is time to integrate this router into my Rack.  I will start by making the router integral with the xPod RPis and will incorporate a master switch in the rack to activate it.  I am thinking of:

• Using it to be the router of choice for the xPod
• Using it to be the octorouter for the Monitoring Network (EXP6 and EXP10)
• Will have to setup the octorouting ability via CLI
• Plugging in EXP6 and EXP10

Update: I have placed this project on hold until I am able to get the Edgerouter-12 POE to play nice.  It seems to be randomly losing it's mind and resetting my configuration.  I will have to play with it some more to get it integrated into the rack.

Project #35 - Adding VLANS to the FLINT1 and FLINT2 routers

I have finally come to the point where I need to setup VLANs on the FLINT routers in my network.  I have noted for some time that people have problems with setting up VLANs on GL-iNet routers in general.  I mainly want to do this so that I can have some vlans that are outside of my normal Edgerouter-12 controlled space.  This would also enable me to get more into the fine tuning of these routers.  I can see having a couple of guest vlans on each router which would connect over iBGP.  I am currently reading a book on the ins and outs of GL-iNet that might give me some better information on how to do this, however at the moment it seems to be more of a word salad than a how to book.

I also need to be careful to document the entire process so that I can reproduce it.  To that end I will document the process in the RedNotebook app.  I intend on noting differences between the FLINT1 and FLINT2 setups. The main changes should be limited to one or two vlans on each router:

• On FLINT1 I will add two VLANs; Guest1 and Arbitrary1 that will not have access to the basic vlan
• On FLINT2 I will add two VLANs; Guest2 and Arbitrary2 that will not have access to the basic vlan
• The setup should be able to be altered to accommodate iBGP or VXLAN in the future (or any other items I might want to experiment with)

Moved the xPod power connections back to a PDU that I have in my rack

 After I changed the xPod RPis to connect to my main switch.  I went through the exercise of moving my main router and main switch to a rack PDU connected through my UPS.  I then moved the second PDU off of my UPS and connected it to my switched power panel (connected also to the same UPS).  I am in talks to have a new Electrical cable run from my main box to my back bedroom.

Checking out the previous effort at a File Server on Proxmox

The LXC #101 was created some time ago (debian 12, turnkey fileserver, 18.0-1).  The last time it was used was in July and I am not sure if I had tried to integrate it with #106 NextCloud; I may have.  So from here it looks like there was a try, but I need to review what steps were taken to set it up.  Also what is the current setup of the Proxmox drives: 2@1TB and 2@4TB drives in the case.

Update: I was able to get it working again and this time as well as connect LXC #101 to Tailscale.  I was then able to pull up a Z drive on my laptop.  Now I can access this Z drive from anywhere.

Project #37 - Setup a File Server on Proxmox

 This is a case of the cart before the horse.  It occurs to me that I need a files server in the network.  I would buy a NAS to integrate, but short of that I am going to utilize my Proxmox server to create a File Server.  Fortunately, there is a Turnkey file server that I can utilize for this purpose.  So this project is to setup a file server using the Turnkey File Server template.  Of course, I need to get the drives setup correctly on Proxmox before I can begin this.

Moved the xPod connections back to my main switch

After thinking about it for a while, I was convinced that I needed to add the other Edgerouter-12p that I have which has a POE capability.  In order to do that, I will need to remove the 8 port switch and 2 ER-X routers which are on the shelf that I need for the ER-12p.  So that means that I will need to rearrange the xPod RPis to connect to the main switch and disconnect the 8 port switch and 2 ER-X routers.

Update: completed

Added Some Collections to the FLINT 2 Router

I decided to add a way to gather statistics on the wireless connection to Connect in my apartment.  I found that luci-app-statistics uses collectd to gather system statistics and uses rrdtool to display them.  I installed luci-app-statistics and collectd on the FLINT2 Router.  Since I have an MQTT server running on port 1883 of the EXP-PiHole RPi, I decided to open up icmp to WAN (port 10) and WAN2 (port 9) on Edgerouter-12.  I then added passthrough of MQTT (1883) to WAN (port 10) on Edgerouter-12 to EXP-PiHole.  I am not sure if WAN2 will pick up the same passthrough message to port 1883; that I will have to test separately. I also installed the following packages on FLINT2: collectd-mod-cpu, collectd-mod-ethstat, collectd-mod-interface, collectd-mod-ipstatistics, collectd-mod-iwinfo, collectd-mod-load, collectd-mod-memory, collectd-mod-mqtt, collectd-mod-network, collectd-mod-rrdtool, collectd-mod-thermal, collectd-mod-uptime, and collectd-mod-wireless.

Update: I have removed the collectd items from FLINT2 because it appeared that it was slowing down the download/upload throughput.