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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Why not use Tailscale on each device?

    No need to expose any ports, no need for a bastion, no need for any complicated method of retrieving their public IP address, can use ACLs to restrict their access to other devices on the tailnet (if they’re tech-savvy enough to go looking at the tailnet in the first place).

    Essentially, as long as they have internet and Tailscale is running, you’ll be able to connect to their device without exposing anything over the internet.














  • The biggest issue you’re going to have is that the Virgin hubs don’t allow you to change the DNS server that they hand out via DHCP.

    By default, Virgin hubs are in ‘Router mode’, this means that they use DHCP to hand out IP addresses, a default gateway address (the hubs own IP address), and DNS server addresses. Typically the DNS server will be the Hub itself and any request sent to the hub will then be forwarded on to the DNS servers that the hub had defined for forward lookup.

    Virgin have decided that they know best and don’t allow you to change the DNS servers that they forward your requests to, so you can’t modify the router to point to your PiHole.

    There are a couple of options here (and forgive me, I’m doing this from memory as I no longer use virgin):

    1. Disable DHCP (IP addresses management) on the Virgin hub and enable it on the PiHole, if possible. You can then configure the PiHole to hand out the IP addresses for the network, including the PiHole address as the DNS servers (and the Virgin hub as the gateway).

    2. Put the Virgin Hub into ‘modem mode’. This requires you to buy an additional router that will allow you to change the DNS servers to point to your PiHole. Putting the Virgin hub in modem mode basically disables all Router functionality and tells it to only terminate the network connection of the virgin connection, you then connect you new router to the hub (and only your new router) to perform all of the functions required to handle your network. You’ll also need to disable WiFi on the Virgin hub (but I think it may do that automatically in modem mode).

    In my opinion, if you can use the method in point 1, that’ll be your easiest and cheapest option, if not, you’re going to have to get a new router.

    When I had Virgin (many, many years ago) I went down route 2, but mainly because I wanted more control over my network than Virgin would allow me than with their shitty virgin hubs.




  • Prometheus for metrics

    Loki for logs

    Grafana for dashboards.

    I use node exporter for host metrics (Proxmox/VMs/SFFs/RaspPis/Router) and a number of other *exporters:

    • exportarr
    • plex-exporter
    • unifi-exporter
    • bitcoin node exporter

    I use the OpenTelemetry collector to collect some of the above metrics, rather than Prometheus itself, as well as docker logs and other log files before shipping them to Prometheus/Loki.

    Oh, I also scrape metrics from my Traefik containers using OTEL as well.