Home-Infra

When I wrote the first iteration of the Lixie tool about year ago (early 2024), my idea was to identify which logs were boring (most of them), interesting (very few of them) and unknown (not yet classified). At the time I chose not to use ‘AI’ (LLMs) for it, and I am still not that convinced they are the best way to approach that particular problem. Ultimately it boils down to human judgment of what is useful is much more realistic (at least in my context) than what the LLMs ‘know’ (absent fine-tuning and-or extensive example sets which I do not by definition have for my personal logs). After choosing not to use LLMs for it, it was just matching exercise - structured logging messages against an ordered set of rules. ...

Background I think I wrote about this in some earlier blog post too, but I have used various home automation solutions for awhile now. I started out with very, very early Home Assistant builds, not quite sure when, but I contributed little in 2014 to it at least (based on git log). Later in 2014 I started developing my own solution with somewhat different decentralized model ( GitHub - fingon/kodin-henki: ‘Spirit of home’ - my home automation project written in Python 2/3. ), which I used about 5 years and then switched to much less featureful but also less maintenance requiring Philips Hue system. ...

TL;DR: Unifi mesh is bad, Orbi is pricey, TP-Link is surprisingly good. Recap (2024 home wifi history) I had Netgear Orbi (75x series) for 4 years (2020-2024) Last summer, I experimented with Unifi (see earlier posts); to put it bluntly, it sucked for mesh use, and I went back to the Orbis The Orbi still did not support wifi 6E which modern Macbook Pros need for more than 1200mbps wifi phy (= more than 600mbps data rate) So, I was on the hunt for more hardware.. New challenger is found In early Black Friday deals in mid-November, I spotted a TP-Link Deco BE65 set at a quite reasonable discount. On the paper, it seemed quite promising. Why is that? ...

As noted in the previous Pulumi post, I had bit too much to write about when describing my current home infrastructure. Due to that, here’s stand-alone post about just that - Pulumi (and pyinfra) at home. Current hobby architecture To give a concrete example of how I am using Pulumi in my current hobby infrastructure, this is a simplified version of my hobby IaC architecture. There is a lot of containers both within and without Kubernetes that I am omitting for clarity from the diagram: fw pyinfra/Pulumi provisioning configures local infrastructure, and oraakkeli Pulumi stack (and two pyinfra configurations) handle my VPSes in Oracle Cloud. ...

Now that we have used it for couple of weeks (Unifi U6 Mesh + Unifi Express + Unifi Flex Mini switch), in one sentence our experience can be summarized as: ‘Do not buy Unifi for mesh networking’. What is wrong with it? Backhaul, or lack of it To elaborate on it, it seems that none of their access points have dedicated backhaul radios, and that means that you are dealing with same congested 5GHz radio band being used both by the client to AP, as well as AP to AP traffic. ...

TL:DR; Home network Wi-Fi upgrade, some observations about it. Preface I have enjoyed some home wifi kit (e.g. I think Apple’s Airport series was simply brilliant piece of hardware AND software), and some I have tolerated. Most of the OpenWrt based ones belong to this camp; while they work, usually setting up multi-node things has been clunky or they somehow fail at awkward times and that isn’t great. The old setup (2020-2024) We bought Netgear Orbi mesh system (750 series) almost exactly four years ago. It replaced more vanilla OpenWrt-based Turris Omnia, and brought with it actually working mesh system.. Most of the time. ...

This is probably the last post on the home infra, at least one that I thought about from the start. I will perhaps write more if I come up with something, but probably the future ones will be less about the overall software stack and more about e.g. Lixie or some other hobby project that is related to the infra, and less about the composition of the infrastructure. Container types, recap - and their lifetime Types of containers: As noted in an earlier post about the architecture, the home router is running plain Debian stable, with 3 types of containers, all provisioned using pyinfra so I do not mess with them on the host itself: ...

I have used a lot of different messaging tools over the years, and some have stuck, others have not. Back in the days: IRC (90s, early 2000s) There was some sporadic use of e.g. talk for point-to-point chatting among users of UNIX hosts. I used to use IRC a lot, starting in the 90s. There were various subject matter channels of interest, and I was quite keen about it at the time. However, its usage petered off gradually. I think my last serious use of it was with erc (Emacs client) in conjunction with bitlbee (which provided bridging to some other IM things that were being used at the time). ...

I have made a point of backing up about anything I do for a long time. Why? (Especially automated) backup systems will eventually be helpful no matter what you do. Whether it is changing or deleting some file that you did not have under version control (oops), hardware going bad, software going bad, hardware getting lost.. I have had all of them, but I have still yet to lose significant amount of data once I started taking backups consistently. ...

During the new home router infra exercise, I also chose to set up as reasonable as possible (lightweight) observability stack for my use. The holy trinity is defined to be metrics, logs, and traces, but as I do not really do much that requires tracing I focused initially on the first two. This exercise occurred mostly in February. Software choices Visualization I chose to go with Grafana. I am very familiar with it, and there seems to be an ecosystem of third-party tools which replicate some of what Aiven had (e.g. dashboard backup/restore tooling, dashboard rewriter I wrote fingon/gg-grafana: Grafana dashboard sanitizer as I could not find something similar in the open world, and so on). ...