Labor Day Weekend 2016 at Disney: Day 1

Time for our annual family vacation to Walt Disney World over the Labor Day Weekend! With school starting early this year (back on August 10th) it seemed like we had to wait a lot longer for our end-of-summer trip.

This year our vacation was threatened by Hurricane Hermine which passed through our area yesterday and today. School was cancelled both days and I ended working from home yesterday and taking today off. We had a lot of wind and rain, but luckily nothing too bad in our immediate neighborhood. Once we received word that the Friday night high school football games were also cancelled, we decided to head over to Orlando early, hopeful that Hermine would cross the state quickly and leave the rest of the weekend alone.

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Ubiquiti EdgeRouter-X

“Infrastructures are essential to everyday life, but they are always the supporting player, never the goal. It is only when there is trouble that the infrastructure is noticed …” -Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer

Ubiquiti ER-X

There was nothing wrong with my almost 5-year old Buffalo router, but after hearing Steve Gibson talk about the $50 Ubiquiti EdgeRouter-X on episode #569 of the Security Now! podcast, I knew it was time to replace the Buffalo.

Unlike most consumer/home routers, the ER-X has no built-in wireless. It’s a router, not an access point. This wasn’t a problem for me since I hadn’t been using the Buffalo for wireless since I had put in the Ubiquity UniFi AP two years ago (and now my AP and new router are from the same manufacturer). Also unlike your average consumer router, the ER-X has five logical interfaces behind its five physical ports (eth0 – eth4). This means you can configure the individual ports however you want. Each port can be its own separate subnet, you can group ports into a switch, bridge ports, etc. (I’m using the traditional 1 WAN port (eth0) plus 4 switched ports (eth1 – eth4) setup). The ER-X can be powered with the included AC brick, or via (non-standard, not 802.3af) 24V passive PoE input on eth0 (which can then do PoE passthru to eth4 to power, say, a UniFi AP). For now I’m using the AC adapter and not PoE.

For the past 9 years I’ve run DD-WRT on my home routers but now, with the ER-X, I’m learning Ubiquiti’s EdgeOS. It’s got a pretty slick interface, although not all of the router’s features are available to configure through the GUI (like setting up a PPTP VPN connection), so some command line interface (CLI) interaction is required. SSH’ing into the router and using the shell to set the more advanced options should be familiar to anyone with Linux experience (once you learn a few Ubiquiti-specific configuration commands).

The driving factor behind switching routers was attempting to re-organize my home network with three separate, isolated segments:

I’m still finalizing the configuration, but so far I’ve set up the three wireless SSIDs on the UniFi AP and tagged two of them (guest and IoT) with VLANs. On the ER-X, I created the two VLANs (on the switch), tagged them on eth4 (the port connected to the AP), set up DHCP servers for the three segments on 192.168.1.0, 192.168.5.0, and 192.168.10.0 and confirmed that the wireless devices on a VLAN get an IP address on the corresponding subnet.

I’ve been having some problems with the firewall setup, so I still have some items to get working:

  • allow pings from VLAN1 to VLAN10 (for Nagios monitoring)
    • update: I wasn’t able to get this working so I put the (previously unused) wireless adapter in my server on the VLAN10 network so it had access to ping devices on that network
  • guest devices on VLAN5 can’t find the UniFi controller on VLAN1 so they don’t load the captive guest portal
    • update: I gave up trying to get this to work. I tried all sorts of firewall rules and other suggestions from people on the EdgeMAX forums but just could not get unauthorized guest devices on VLAN5 to see the UniFi controller
  • learn how to write firewall rules for true subnet separation (except for the Nagios requirement above)
    • update: I got these working using this information as a baseline (along with help from EdgeMAX forum members). Basically I wrote two pairs of rules (one IN and one LOCAL for the guest and IoT VLANs) that prevent them from talking to the primary LAN and each other.
  • separate a wired device on eth2 to be part of VLAN10
    • update: after re-doing some setup from scratch, I got this working on eth1 by setting the PVID to 10 for that port in switch0
  • NAT hairpin/loopback for the VLANs
    • update: despite having switch0.5 added as a LAN interface on the Port Forwarding tab, enabling the “Hairpin NAT” checkbox, and suggestions from the EdgeMAX forums members (like DNAT rules) I cannot get devices on the guest VLAN5 to access local services (like access to this blog).

The ER-X is a pretty advanced device for $50 and I’m looking forward to learning more about advanced networking topics as I tweak it. Just so long as my family can deal with the home network going down a lot as I make mistakes. 🙂

Leaving Evernote for OneNote

I seem to be saying goodbye to a lot of long-used software this week … first Trillian, and now Evernote.

I’ve been an Evernote user since 2009, and a Premium annual subscriber since 2014. Their recent price increase announcement, however, would cause my $45/year subscription to jump to $70 next February when my renewal comes up. That steep of an increase started me wondering if I really needed a Premium subscription, or if I needed to continue to use Evernote at all. I keep a lot of stuff in Evernote, and have spent a significant amount of time maintaining and tweaking the data in it (like my recipes, home inventory, etc.) so I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to making a switch, but decided I should at least check out the alternatives.

The obvious replacement was Microsoft OneNote. I’m already paying about $80/year for my household Office 365 subscription, and started using OneNote heavily at work once I got my Surface Pro 3 in 2015 (and continue to do so with my Surface Pro 4). OneNote does all the same cloud syncing that Evernote does, supports multiple devices (like my iPhone), and has decent search and share capabilities, so I decided to give it a shot as my Evernote replacement.

Migrating was actually amazingly simple. Using Microsoft’s importer, I just had to select the Evernote notebooks I wanted to import, login to OneNote, and let the process run:

OneNote Importer

A short time later, I had all 1200+ notes in OneNote notebooks and sections (you can find more detailed migration instructions here and here). It’s not perfect, to be sure: my PDF attachments appear as attachments and printouts in the converted notes, tags are just #text in the notes so you can’t easily view a list of tagged documents) but it’s pretty close. I still have some cleanup to do and it’s only been a few days since my migration, but hopefully I don’t run into any major problem that makes me regret my decision.

Also, if you’re going to use OneNote heavily, I recommend checking out Onetastic.

A Farewell to Trillian

I’ve been a Trillian Pro user since 2004 but the time has come to drop my favorite cross-platform instant messaging client. Apparently Yahoo is shutting down the legacy servers that run the old Windows/Mac client versions of Yahoo Messenger (in favor of the web and mobile versions) on August 5 so Trillian will no longer work with that service. Couple that with a security breach on July 4 that resulted in the permanent shutdown of the Trillian user support forums and blog and I found it hard rationalize keeping the software installed. Now I’m glad I hadn’t yet paid to renew my Pro subscription for the new 6.0 version of the client.

Amazon Music

Now that I have an Amazon Echo in the house, I wanted to be able to play my music collection by just asking Alexa to do it. Since the Echo relies on the cloud, it can only play local music when it’s paired to a device as a speaker. So I could pair my iPhone or PC to it and play music from iTunes, but that’s so … manual! In order to say “Alexa, play some Oingo Boingo” and have her look at my own tracks instead of what’s available for free on Prime Music, those music files needed to be in Amazon’s cloud so I decided to try Amazon Music.

Prime subscribers can upload up to 250 tracks to their Amazon Music library for free, but I have about 20x that many songs so I paid the $24.99 for a year of the service, which increases the limit to 250,000 songs (a lot more than I have). This is in line with what Apple charges for iTunes Match but Google Music (which I’ve been using as just another cloud backup for my music library) is free up to 50,000 tracks. The Echo doesn’t work with Google Music though, obviously, as Amazon wants to keep you in their ecosystem, so I paid for the subscription, downloaded the app, and started uploading my library.

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TiVo Bolt

TiVo BoltIt’s been three years since I bought my last TiVo and now that I have a 4K TV I wanted to be able to watch some 4K content. Despite Rovi’s purchase of TiVo and the uncertainty of the future of the hardware business, I purchased TiVo’s latest Series6 model, the TiVo Bolt UES (Unified Entertainment System).

I went with the smaller (500gb for 75 HD hours) hard drive model because in retrospect, my six tuner, 3TB Roamio Pro seemed to be overkill for my needs: even with two Minis in the house I didn’t see a lot of tuner contention and that DVR’s hard drive hardly went above 20% utilization. Hard drive upgrades are pretty simple, though, should I need to expand the Bolt’s recording capacity. This is also the first TiVo I’ve owned since my original Series2 boxes that I haven’t purchased the lifetime service plan for. Instead, I went with the annual fee, figuring this would make it financially easier to replace the box in the next few years if something goes wrong with it (lifetimed units aren’t eligible for the Continual Care Warranty), or a newer, better model comes out (despite the Rovi’s ownership) and I want to upgrade.

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Amazon Echo

Amazon EchoFor Father’s Day I got an Amazon Echo, Amazon’s voice-activated smart home speaker. You may know it (her?) as Alexa. If you’ve followed the blog, or even just glanced at it, you know I love tech gadgets and am also no stranger to dabbling in home automation so the Echo has been a fun toy to play with so far.

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Time to update that graphic … Cavs win!

Tears. Cleveland is used to that, although for 52 years they’ve been salty. The sports history in that town is more than ready to welcome a new addition. From The Fumble to The Drive to The Shot, there is finally something to hug: The Championship.

Unbelievable. For the first time in franchise history, the Cleveland Cavaliers are NBA Champions, defeating the Golden State Warriors 93-89 in Game 7 (the first time in NBA history a team has come back from being down 3 games to 1 to win it all). Finally the networks can update this graphic I seem to see every year one of our teams is in the playoffs:

Cleveland Sports

Now they can finish “Believeland.” Congratulations, Cavs, and thank you!

Netgear GSS108E managed click switch

Netgear GSS108ELast week at work we received a pair of Netgear ProSafe gigabit managed click switches (the 8-port GSS108E and 16-port GSS116E) to outfit a conference room. I was impressed with the mounting options and after seeing the 8-port one was less than $50 on Amazon, I decided to get one for my home office.

The GSS108E replaced a TRENDnet TEG-S80g (a sturdy metal, 8-port gigabit switch), which I had sitting on top of my standing desk. The click switch can be mounted in four different ways, and the power cable attaches in two different ways to accommodate most installations. I attached the plastic mounting plate to the underside of my desk (with the included screws but opted not to use the additional adhesive pads), clicked the switch onto the plate, and then re-ran my cabling. The result is a cleaner desktop and some extra USB charging ports easily accessible under the desk. Unfortunately in this position the labels on the ports are upside down, which seems like a slight design oversight.

The plastic GSS108E and metal GSS116E are managed switches, so you can log into their web interfaces and do some basic configuration like setting up VLANs, enabling QoS, configuring mirror ports, performing cable tests, or turning off the LEDs. Not features I need in my home office but not bad for a sub-$50 piece of hardware.