Trying to Get Back into the Groove of HomeLab

I admit it, I have been relaxed in updating this blog.  Lately it's been because of the death of an immediate member of my family and the birth of another. So, I have been experiencing the lows and highs of emotion.  However, I intend on getting back on task since I need to have a focus area.

I intend on revisiting the projects that I have not completed; dropping some, attacking the remainder, and coming up with new projects to keep the entry into HomeLab fully up to date.  I think that I will focus on three things:

• Setting up a certificate authority/creation process so that all infrastructure is encrypted
• Setting up a NAS for my HomeLab
• Setting up PiHole so that I can use its features to start removing ads

Since I have the PiHole located in the Living Room, I will start there by connecting the PiHole to the FLINT router.  I am still going to use the DHCP server on the FLINT but may cause the DNS to come from the PiHole.

Project #33 - Moving the DHCP and DNS over to PiHole

This is one project that has stuck in my craw for a number of years.  I am now in a situation where I am about to change out my network to be in two pieces.  I have enough computers to think about a centralized DHCP/DNS server for the network.  I have used PiHole in the past but now I want to make that the default for all of the routers in my network.  The rub is, I have all of these vlans that need attention when I am giving out IP addresses.  This will be an effort to consolidate the IP gathering and DNS entries into one location that is easier to control.  Some specifics of what I want to do are:

• setup my Netgear switches to force certain IP ranges to certain vlans
• use PiHole to issue DHCP IP addresses tied to their MAC addresses
• if the MAC address is unknown, push it to a guest network
• include both the FLINT1 and FLINT2 routers in the mix
• modify my FLINT2 setup to have one guest network vlan that is passthrough

Trying to Resurrect the WeatherPi

Now that I have most of the previous parts of the network seemingly working again (have found replacements for the two Netgear GS108Tv2s that crapped out), I can concentrate on some of the other items that seemed to have gone south.  The first up is the WeatherPi that is connected to my Personal Weather Station.  It doesn't seem to be pushing data out anymore.

I am also wondering if this would be a good time to replace the WeatherPi with a USB server and move the weewx program to the HA Server.  The HA Server is also giving me problems right now, but I can deal with that later.  First off, I am going to try to get the WeatherPi to at least push data to weather underground again.

I did manage to remove the WeatherPi from underneath the TV stand and discovered that the SD Card was pretty much done with (probably a result of the power outage).  I put a new SD Card into the RPi that used to be the WeatherPi and discovered that the RPi was okay.  The new designation was PiHoleLDAP; apparently this was the one that was going to be the one that I was going to use for the PiHole, Radius, and LDAP setup using Docker.  Which reminds me, there is no reason that I cannot run weewx under Docker, I just have to research it.

There seems to be a bit of a problem with weather underground.  Since IBM took over, the API has been removed; so things like predictions and the like are no longer available to gather for an html display.  Weewx has not been updated for Python 3, so should I go to a different outlet to publish the weather station data, or should I just abandon the weather station all together?  Part of me is saying the latter, because I still have to maintain the station, look at the stats, and generally update portions of this as my time allows.  Going into retirement, it would be a scheduled activity that I would do say once every two weeks.  Not sure if it is worth the trouble.

Update: it is looking like weewx under Docker is going to be a pain to complete.  There are a number of builds on the Docker site, but all of them are rather complicated.  I am going to have to delay getting this accomplished.

DHCP-DNS on a PiHole

So now is the time to start putting in a PiHole to control DNS access.  All along I have been thinking of constraining the dns connections from the IOT equipment.  There are times when equipment will attempt to get it’s DNS ip addresses through a hard coded IP address.  What I want to do is force the DNS access through the PiHole and have the PiHole get its DNS addresses via DNSSEC to either 1.1.1.1 or 9.9.9.9.  That way I have the PiHole restricting the trackers and the DNSSEC servers to provide restriction from known bad addresses, whether web or ip.  Since I have moved the IOT equipment to one of the Edgerouter-Xs, I should be able to control the DNS access through some judicious ACL setups.  Should be interesting.

First of all the PiHole is put into the IOT lan subnet, and the ER-X then uses the PiHole as both DHCP and DNS services.  I will setup the ER-X to force any DNS service connections to go through the PiHole (https://community.ui.com/questions/Intercepting-and-Re-Directing-DNS-Queries/cd0a248d-ca54-4d16-84c6-a5ade3dc3272 and https://benninger.ca/posts/force-dns-go-through-pihole/ and https://www.myhelpfulguides.com/2018/07/30/redirect-hard-coded-dns-to-pi-hole-using-edgerouter-x/ ).  Since I know all of the equipment in my network, including the IOT network, I will force IP addresses where I want them through Static assignment (TBD).  In addition, I am going to restrict Bonjour access throughout the ER-X lan subnet (TBD).  I will of course restrict changes to the ER-X through my Admin vlan and not through the IOT vlan (TBD).  Anyway that is the idea at the moment.  Time will tell how well this works.