Friday Feedback

Returning to Normal

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and new year. Here, we are slowly returning to normal. Once child has returned to school and the other is scheduled to head back on Sunday.

We haven’t gotten the tree down and put away, but it is on to-do list.

Almost all the junk food is gone. Which is good for me. Meals are back to normal.

You get what you pay for

I needed to solder a header onto a GPS board. No problem, I just dig out the Weller 921ZX. Oops, sometime in the past 10 years since I used it, it was dropped and the iron broke.

No problem, this is a serious brand, they will have replacement parts.

Except they don’t. This was a lower cost product when I purchased it. It has been discontinued. There are no replacement parts available.

So I bought a cheap version. And I got exactly what I paid for. The indicator light doesn’t indicate very well. When it was reporting 500F, it wouldn’t even tin the tip. I had to crank the thing to 800F before it started to perform reasonably.

It will do for now. I’ve put the project on hold until finances get a bit better.

Wow, this is spectacular, and bad

Years ago, my client was unhappy with the Wi-Fi in the office. He went to one of my co-workers, a programmer, not a system admin, not a network admin, a programmer, and asked if it was ok to buy a particular, expensive, router.

It arrived, he plugged it in, in place of the access point I had in place and the network died. They couldn’t get Wi-Fi to their MacBooks. The world was pretty bad.

Of course, this didn’t set off any alarms for me because I monitor the hardwired servers and such.

When I arrived the next day, they told me in a panic what was happening. I retrieved the login credentials for the new access point, discovered it was an “all in one” router, switch, access point. I got it mostly configured to work.

Boss complains about the Wi-Fi. I explain that they are in a building with multiple networks, all competing for the same frequencies. That I could fix it if he gave me the budget to do so. Having just spent all this money on a home gamer’s super router, he wasn’t interested.

He stumbles on somebody doing network mapping in the building. He pays this random dude to do network mapping for him.

Next time I’m in, he shows me the report that he paid for and explains that we are in a very crowded network area and that we had to fix it.

His answer was “more power”. I again offered to fix it.

He finally gave in, I installed Ubiquiti UFOs. These are their PoE Wi-Fi access points. Not routers, access points. They have a central management software. I installed 4 of them in the office. Told them to play nice with each other. Our Wi-Fi network issues went away.

These devices could overpower most routers, but they didn’t have to. They handled hand-offs seamlessly so they could use lower power and only cover the areas they were assigned to.

In other words, fantastic equipment at a reasonable cost.

I was also using their routers. Again, good quality at a good price.

Over the years, that love for Ubiquiti has faded. I still love their UFOs. It is their routers that are the issue.

The cost of their higher – end routers is a bit much for what you get. And their configuration method is based on VyOS.

It is time to replace those routers. I’ve done it twice with upgrading in the same product line. It is time to step away from their routers.

pfSense

pfSense is a firewall router that runs on FreeBSD on almost any equipment. The hardware requirements are trivial. Two network ports, that’s all.

This became viable because I found a dirt cheap “miniPC”. It uses an Intel n100, which is fast enough for what I need.

But what makes it truly remarkable is that it comes with 2 10G SFP+ ports, 2 2.5G Ethernet ports, 2 USB 3, 2 USB 2, 1 USB-C, another USB port, two HDMI ports, and more.

It has two comm ports on headers, and a large set of GPIO pins. It has an internal SATA port as well. 2 M.2 ports for SSD and 1 M.2 port for Wi-Fi. The entire thing comes in an extruded aluminum case with a fan. So far, I’ve been happy with it.

So what’s the issue? It’s made in China and there is no datasheet for the motherboard. This means I require a new skill, decoding pinouts.

Moreover, FreeBSD (the base OS of pfSense) doesn’t seem to expose the GPIO ports the same way as Linux would. This means I can’t use the GPIO for the PPS.

Convicted Felon

The saga continues. Trump has been certified as the winner of the 2024 election. A county judge out of New York wants to brand him a felon in an attempt to keep him from taking office.

To that end, he intends to sentence Trump before the inauguration.

What a crock.

The Excitement Builds

If you are reading this on Friday the 10th, the Supreme Court is or was in conference discussing cases they will accept. Three of those cases are Second Amendment Cases.

Orders will be released on Monday or Tuesday. As long as we do not see “denied”, we are looking good.

Question of the Week

Do you think that the Democrats are going to try anything on inauguration day? Either at the mob end of things or in the halls of Congress?