Networking

Since I was a teenager, I have started voluntarily helping people around me with my skill of technology. This time, I’m helping someone to build up a robust, secure and cost-effective firewall/gateway/soft router at home. It ends up on a $100 worth N100 mini-pc with dual Ethernet port, which can be a great pfSense box for home or even business use. Hardware Tweaks This model (T8PLUS) secured with 4 screws at outside, after removing them the outer case can be easily pried open (just a little bit more effort than Intel NUCs), and removing 4 more screws inside to get the access of the motherboard (way more simpler design of the power button comparing to NUCs). ...

There are many reasons why I’m doing this. In the days when Virtual Machine was the thing, VMware Workstation was the go-to option for a Windows host to run VMs. We have to find cracked version for personal use, since there was no VirtualBox neither Hyper-V. Many years ago, when I first decided to have a proper homelab in my household, I went blindly into ESXi just because VMware Workstation has already installed on all of my computers. Although I was pretty like Proxmox during that time, it was considered for not so serious projects. ...

Days before mini-PC become a thing, there was no NUC, MinisForum or Beelink. It was the time of thin client and SFF (small-form-factor), manufacturers such as Shuttle, Dell and Lenovo were made a lot of these. Back then, the performance of SoC was too weak so that even laptops wouldn’t use them. But my first dedicated home lab machine was an Atom D525, which was called embedded industrial computer. It served as a router rather than server due to its performance and heat. That was also the time when I got into the world of m0n0wall derivatives (pfSense/FreeNAS). ...

Recently I came down to want a mobile hotspot when going out of home, something like Netgear Nighthawk M series, but able to flash custom firmware (OpenWrt/pfSense equivalents) and cheap. However, there is no such thing on the market even without budget consideration. So it has to be done with DIY, like USB tethering with a router. In the case of tethering or so called Ethernet over USB, we are using a phone as a cellular modem for our router. ...

RustDesk is my favorite remote desktop tool which is the best alternative to any closed-source solutions, such as TeamViewer and Anydesk. It’s kinda like Bitwarden in the post-breach era of the cloud password manager (LastPass/1Password) market. As a light user of RustDesk, I use it only occasionally. So I didn’t setup my own RD server on VPS even though I suppose to. For some reason, one of my RustDesk client got blocked to the official servers. So now I have enough reason to properly making it up. ...