It’s a complete bodge job of a hole, but I took mine, put a USB UART connector in there, and jumpered the pins so I can have serial console access on it.

So I got it working, but it’s a bit weird.

First of all, had to set the sensitivity to 1, which is the highest. Default is 11. Second, I only want it to trigger if we’re changing states. That is, from on to off, not just opening and closing the door. So the solution is to create a binary sensor with delay_on and delay_off so that it only changes states when you go to the on or off state for that length of time.

My initial idea was 5 seconds on, 5 off, which eliminates the door opening and such. The only thing to be mindful of is that the default timeout is 60 (65?) seconds, so once it reads, it won’t trip again until the timeout expires. Translates to if you turn the dryer on for 10 seconds and then off, you don’t get the off state to trigger until 60 seconds after it turned on because the sensor doesn’t poll that often.

Draw.io, but I’ve put a lot of time into custom shapes and such.

It’s only been a bit less than a month since the last diagram update, but I’ve done a lot of rearranging!

As per usual, diagram and shape libraries for those of you that want to check it out! Ansible playbooks are also on GitHub, though they still need to be updated to fit the new migration to Proxmox.

The new server layouts have been inspired by /u/rts-2cv’s modified version of /u/gjperera’s own template.

Also, there are a few easter eggs in the diagram now. Feel free to see if you can find em!

The obvious

Many of y’all have mentioned dark mode. Took me a while to get the colors to look good, and I’m still not sold on the colored server blocks for the VLANs, but I don’t think they look awful. It’s certainly harder getting things to look good for those backgrounds than it is in light mode.

Diagram updates

Hardware specs

I’ve wanted to showcase hardware specs for a while, and finally came up with a decent looking way to do it.

Services

Hopefully, this makes it a bit clearer as to what things that might not be standard I’m running in certain situations.

Core updates

OPNsense

Heard about the shenanigans Netgate has been pulling for a while now with pfSense, but the nail in the coffin was when someone couldn’t reinstall Home/Lab due to an invalid license, and found out about the cancellation of that program via support ticket, because no official announcement was made at the time.

Anyway, I set up OPNsense from scratch, backed up pfSense config, and combed through it and manually recreated everything. Somehow total downtime was less than 2 hours.

Removed remote access VPN

The remote access VPN is no longer needed, and since I can access things via Tailscale, I removed the tunnel and made one less hole I have to poke in the firewall.

New™ zirconium Optiplex server

I’ve recently inherited an Optiplex 7050 Micro that was given to me. Nothing too powerful, but I slapped 16GB of RAM in it, and it now serves its duty running Home Assistant.

In lieu of moving Home Assistant to the 3020, I’ve elected to install it here. This lets me tuck this in on a different UPS from the rack. While the HA dashboard will be down if the rack goes down, cause there won’t be network access, Zigbee most importantly should still work. Which means that maintenance on the servers or the UPS in the rack won’t disable my lights from working.

Zigbee stuff

On a related note, I migrated all of the lights I have from the Philips Hue bridge to Home Assistant on zirconium and now I can theoretically rip that out of the rack. Frees up a plug on the PDU, and it gets rid of the second Zigbee network, so in theory everything should work a little bit better.

But holy shit, compared to Hue stuff just working on their bridge and the app, I spent so much time getting lights working again. Still don’t have a reliable way to cycle through scenes on the dimmers, but I have on/off and brightness working for now, so that’s the thing that matters.

Network updates

DN42

So this whole thing is new to me, and I’m still in the process of getting things up, but I have an ASN with DN42 now, and have peered with someone, and can see routes. The curious thing I cannot figure out is that from OPNsense, I can ping my peer on the other side of the VPN, and I have routes advertised to me via BGP, so it should know where everything is, but I can’t ping anything on the DN42 network.

If someone knows how I might fix this, that would be awesome!

VM updates

Debian development environment

I’ve had some weird issues with upgrading Python on Ubuntu, and migrated to Python 3.12 for one of my projects. As a result, I’ve added a Debian based VM on my computer that has Python installed where I can compile Python 3.12 things.

To Do List

• Fix my Ansible playbooks, and properly write them to do more things. One of these days, I’ll get around to it.