Cluster#1 - 802.1q at L2 Along with Routing at L3 in the 1-Port Router

Ok, I am still playing around here with routing and 802.1q.  My latest endeavor is using Quagga along with shorewall to produce some useful home appliances.  Unfortunately, this is all going to be running at a 100MHz clip on Ethernet rather than the nice 1GHz Ethernet lines I have running through the house.  However, I get to play with the outcome.

When I last broached the subject here, I had added the 802.1q capability to the RPi Raspbian load.  I have since been adding a number of RPis, without a clear purpose to what I would do with them.  I now have a quad RPi cluster (shown in the image above) that I can use for some of the networking experiments.  The latest experiment is to setup each RPi in the cluster with a Quagga and shorewall routing load.  Shorewall is primarily a firewall, but with some alterations to the definition files, it will serve its purpose as a router capability.  The Quagga software allows me to experiment with OSPF and BGP routing protocols, the idea being that I can simply configure them and drop them into my network at home at any place and the routing tables will automatically be built for me.

My idea is to use the normal Ethernet interface to the RPi as the connection point to the other Quagga/shorewall RPis on a separate no-mans land VLAN.  I would then use 802.1q to trunk my way into VLAN switches which would then distribute the information as necessary.  I can also modify the way that I am connecting and actually have a VLAN switch capability on an RPi with attached USB hub running to USB-to-Ethernet adapters, each "port" having a trunk line or untagged port.  This of course gets somewhat expensive since the cheapest I can find those adapters is $6.99 at amazon.  I wish that I could find an Ethernet switch adapter that would allow me to experiment with an RPi controller.

Update: as you can see from the new site picture, I have been able to setup the RPi cluster along with some cheap ($6.99) USB to Ethernet adapters.  Now the fun begins!

Learning BGP - Thinking of adding a number of RPi BGP routers to the network

I have been toying with a way of cross-pollinating the packets on my home network.  Right now I am at a quandary on how to allow computers on my Media VLAN to talk to the printer on the Pers VLAN.  It is an interesting problem and one that strangely enough has something to do with two projects that I am working on at work.  I want to explore how to route information from one network to another given that the subnet on each end of the gateway have the same ip addresses, but yet must remain different.  I think the key to this something approaching the BGP protocol perhaps with some gateway translation in the middle.  More later.

CC #7 - Finally settled on a partial solution

I modified the FIOS TV setup - I now have reduced the Extreme package down to the Custom TV package.  In addition, I have dumped the FIOS DVR and STB rental for a TiVo Bolt and 2 TiVo Minis.  The Bolt serves as the DVR in my setup and the two Minis are able to stream the shows and set the tuners (4 on the Bolt vs. 2 on the FIOS DVR) to stream TV.  The entire setup is running on Ethernet (the Media VLAN) through my house.  This is actually predicted to run about $70 per month less than my current Verizon bill.  I also went from 25/25 to 50/50 on the internet.

Update: I have had a chance to get a couple of bills since I posted this.  The difference between what I was paying and what I am paying now amounts to about $80 since my bill was over $200 per month.  So I am reasonably happy now with the new setup - and the wife seems to be happy as well.  I'm not missing paying the Sports Fee every month.

SynthBoost Project #4 - Flow Through Experiment

As I try and look through what I will be doing, it might be nice to get a general flow through experiment up and going. What I envision is to have all of the vintage gear hooked into the 4x4 midi interface, then through the powered usb hub, through the RPi, and then in turn hook it to the iPad. The RPi would provide a number of virtual midi connections to the iPad. Each of the vintage gear would be tethered through the RPi and the virtual connections. This would form the baseline and could be used to measure overall lag through the setup.

SynthBoost Project #3 - Working Multiple Use Cases

I have been working on getting a work router ready for use with an RPi. The idea is to have two wifi adapters and make use of the Ethernet port. One of the wifi adapters (work subnet) connects to my work network and the second (home1 subnet) provides a wifi access point. The Ethernet port is used to provide a different subnet (home2 subnet) separate from the home1 subnet but still connecting through the work subnet. The home1 subnet provides a web server providing various setup functions. The home2 subnet is used to provide a wireless capability to a laptop. I have the work and home1 subnet so set up and am almost able to use the Ethernet port with the home2 subnet.  I am currently having issues with being able to separate out the two homex subnets.  I currently use hostapd and isc-dhcp-server for dhcp ip address resolution.

I am going to make use of the web server through a 7" tablet for the midi functions. The tablet will be used to provide a touch capability to select and control different capabilities.

More Later.

Project #9 - Change Over the Media Components from Verizon to TiVo to Reduce Costs

The charge that I am getting from Verizon has been ever increasing.  No matter what I try Verizon keeps nickle and dimeing me to get more and more money.  I am tired and I now want to convert everything over in a move to someday go completely "Cut the Cable."

SynthBoost Project #2 - A Midi Router - Translator - Patcher

It occurred to me that I might be approaching the SynthBoost project the wrong way.  I have been exploring the possibility of augmenting my DW-8000 synthesizer with a Raspberry Pi to do various new things.  But what I think I really want is something in the middle that performs a whole bunch of functions.  If I use the RPi as a midi router, then I might have a better shot at success.  I have thoughts about setting up my equipment as shown in the following diagram:

In order to do this I would need the Raspberry Pi to act as a midi-router.  First of all I wanted to see if plugging in the 4x4 midi switch and the iRig would show up separately.  In order to see if the new iRig Pads would work on the RPi, I ran a python program after plugging the USB cable into one of the ports.

pygame.init()
pygame.midi.init()

for id in range(pygame.midi.get_count()):
print pygame.midi.get_device_info(id)

This gave me the following sequence:

('ALSA', 'Midi Through Port-0', 0, 1, 0)
('ALSA', 'Midi Through Port-0', 1, 0, 0)
('ALSA', 'iRig PADS MIDI 1', 0, 1, 0)
('ALSA', 'iRig PADS MIDI 1', 1, 0, 0)

This tells me that it is possible to interface to the iRig Pads device from my Raspberry Pi.  This shows that the ALSA is capable of accessing the midi interfaces.  When I plugged in the 4x4 midi switch and the 1x1 midi adapter, the items also showed up after running this same python program.  Now I am in a better position to figure out a solution.  I have been looking a a number of software solutions, most notably mididings.  Mididings is python based and uses the ALSA and JACK to its advantage.  I have not setup mididings on the RPi yet, but I hope to do that this week.

More information later.