Tech is fun sometimes :)

I haven’t quite lost it yet

A little bit ago my wife was having trouble accessing work machines over her work VPN.

It turns out that:

1. the work VPN doesn’t route all traffic (come on! it should! then you’d avoid weird issues like this when your employees are married to goofy network administrators!)
2. the machines at work were in the 10/8 network space, which.. so is our home 😅 (and a lot of other homes too, even on standard consumer routers!)

I’m so happy I was able to stand up a new SSID, VLAN, subnet, and DHCP server that resolved the issue in literally just a few minutes.

Like I know this isn’t a huge task at all, but I’ve been really afraid of losing all my skills and knowledge, especially because I haven’t done this kind of thing in four years.. and also the COVID-19 brain damage.

This felt good :)

Smart Vacuum Shenanigans

Finally resolved my offline Roomba issues! I connected it to a temporary /24 subnet attached to a virtual WLAN interface, and then once it was all registered, I took that network out from underneath it and put it back on to our main /16 using the same SSID it was connected to.

Why did I have to do it that way? The necessary app to get the vacuum online simply refuses to scan a network larger than a /24. Why do I run a /16 in my home? Because I’m a goofy network admin who likes to dick around with shit. Once it was registered back into the phone app and the cloud, I tried to get it into Home Assistant again.

Roomba devices can only be attached to one thing at a time. Either the iRobot cloud or locally to Home Assistant. We used to have it locally connected, but since the factory wipe I’ve been hoping to get it connected to both somehow. HASS’ documentation makes reference to a “continuous mode” that allows HASS to talk to the cloud for robot access and control, but there’s no documentation about this and it’s not mentioned at all on the forums. Instead, the forums tell you to use the rest980 addon, which exposes a REST API to manage and monitor the robot. This sortof works for our model, but.. it’s built primarily around persistent mapping functions, which the i2 model does not have, and it’s a pain in the fucking ass to set up and integrate into Home Assistant. I’ve given up on it. I’m debating whether I want to keep it cloud connected or put it in HASS again.

Cloud connected:
➕ Firmware updates
➕ Consumable tracking
➖ Less control over scheduling and alerts

HASS connected:
➕ Robust scheduling and alerting system
➖ No firmware updates
➖ No consumable tracking

To move between each thing I have to completely reset the vacuum and then re-pair it to whichever I want. It’s a pain in the ass. And if I want to put it on the cloud for firmware updates, I also have to do the subnet song and dance.

I’m putting this one aside. The vacuum is at least online again.

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Both of these incidents remind me of why I love RouterOS so much: it lets me do what I want and doesn’t often get in my way, even when apps and services do.