Tiernans Comms Closet

I use ZeroTier on my network for a good few things, including internal network peering between BGP VMs, management of machines, and now, connecting to my car over LTE. This is one of those posts that sounds silly, but is very handy! First, the parts list:

• Car.
• 3G/4G/5G modem of some sort. I am using a Huawei Wingle. Can be used without the Router below, but I wanted Zerotier, so I have it in modem only mode.
• A router that supports Zerotier. I am using a modified TP-Link TL-WR703N upgraded to 16MB ROM and 64MB RAM. This is required for newer OpenWRT builds
• a dashcam that connects over Wifi. I am using a BlackVue DR750S-2CH
• Latest ROOter software from Of Modems and Men
• Patients.

After installing the the latest copy of ROOter on the TPLink (or router of your choice) and getting the modem configured correctly (this took a while) you need to install the Zerotier software though the dashboard. Once installed, I joined my Zerotier network using the CLI (SSH into the router) and the approved it though the my.zerotier.com dashboard. Once its approved and connected, you can now go to the Zerotier IP and get to the router directly. From here, you can either setup a route in Zerotier to point at the internal network behind the router, or, in my case, setup a  SSH tunnel to the dashcam. I found the IP given to the dashcam and used SSH forwarding to get to it. Finally, i used the URLs from Digital-Nebula’s hackview repo to get to the different URLs. I use this to download stuff like GPS logs, emergency videos, etc. I have to clean up some scripts at some stage for this, and plan to upload them at some stage.

I have posted about backups a few times on this site in recent years, and its still something I make tweaks to every now and again. The latest setup is probably over the top, but I will give you a walk though on it and some of it could be useful to some of you.

I have a couple of different machines and storage devices running that need backups. Some need daily backups, some could get away with weekly. The list is as follows:

With the whole Work From Home thing probably becoming more and more normal in the years to come (I can count on 2 hands how many times I have physically been in my main office in the last 7 months) there are a couple of certainties in that people will come up against. One is passwords expiring and needing to be changed, one is password resets being required and finally laptops or desktops needing to be domain joined or connected to the domain before they can be fully provisioned. As the (currently only) IT guy in our office, I have had to deal with these first hand, and decide to write this post, helping both my fellow employees, and possibly other IT Admins stuck in this challenge.

[NOTE] This post was done entirely on iPhone XS Max and a iPad Pro. Photos taken on the iPhone. Some edited on iPhone, some on the iPad. I have edited some text on the iPad with the keyboard, but if i missed anything, all was written mostly live, so apologies… Will add extra links to places like Engadget, etc, below.

Homepod mini. $99 available 16 November. The feature of intercom sounds good… When they mentioned the list of extra service, Spotify was very missing… [NOTE] I missed some stuff on this cause I was in a late meeting… This does look cool though.

A few days back (October 6th 2020) VMWare announced a new “Fling”: ESXi Arm Edition. Not completely sure what a Fling is, but anyway, I started reading, liked the idea and managed to download a copy for testing. I have 2 Pi 4s in the house, both 4Gb Models, and I wanted to play around with the new tech.

A few months back, I pre ordered a Nexdock Touch. The Nexdock Touch is a laptop without the laptop components… its essentially a screen (1920×1080 touch) with a keyboard, battery, touch pad, a 3 USB C ports (one for charging, one for phones only and one for connecting other devices) a Full USB A port (for plugging in other stuff, more on that in a sec), a Micro SD Card and a full HDMI port. Interestingly, the HDMI port is not for output, like you would think it is, but for input.

I have moved my blog back over to WordPress. It is running in house, on one of my workstations, using Cloudflare’s Argo tunnel to protect it on the internet. You might be asking “why?!” Well, its a couple of things.

That last one is the reason I haven’t blogged in a while. Seems there was a major change in the versioning of Hugo, somewhere between the release I was on (0.55.6) and the latest one I tried (0.73.0 or something… 0.76.3 is out now) and my index.html pages just would not create, and I got many warnings when building… I spent a few hours trying to figure it out, but in the end, I gave up.

In a previous post i talked about going all in on VoIP in the house. Its been nearly a year now, and other than some minor issues related to the VoIP Server being turned off accidentally, or a screw up on my end, all is going well. But, one thing i did notice was related to incoming calls and caller Id, specifically on my SIP2SIM card. Essentially, the country code was wrong: for example: Incoming calls from the Virgin Media trunk just show as local numbers (for Dublin, for example, it would so 01xxxxxxx). Using the CID reformatting feature in 3CX, I managed to change this.

So, this post has been a long time coming! A load of different things to talk about, so lets get started!

GodBox V3

So, for a long time, I have been thinking about GodBoxV3, the replacement to GodBoxV2. And when planning this, i had some ideas of what it should be:

• Minimum of 2×16 cores (double godboxv2)
• About the same RAM, if not more
• FAST STORAGE!
• Is able to run my twin 30" 4K monitors
• Would like 10Gb/s NICs

Well, It finally happened! I got the machine, built it and, well, its impressive! How did i do with specs? Well…

A few months back, Three Ireland came out with an LTE broadband offer: Unlimited* LTE broadband for EUR30 per month. It did come with a 18 month contract, but I pulled the trigger and got it as a backup link. I picked this up in the local Three store, and they had a couple of options for modems: a couple of Huawei mobile Wifi hotspots (E5573 or E5577) or a Huawei B525 Modem, which is designed for home use. Alternatively, there was a Sim only option, but given the modem was free with the contact, i went with the B525.