Author's posts

Migrating from VMware ESXi to Proxmox

So, news that VMware is going subscription only is not going well with some home labbers however lots of home labbers are already using Proxmox. Since Broadcom’s announcement of their purchase of VMware I’ve been slowly transitioning over to Proxmox and phasing out ESXi at home. There is a touch of sadness as I used …

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Baby Jumbo Frames and PPPoE

It’s quite common for ISPs to assign static IP addresses to their customers via PPPoE rather that via DHCP. Eir, the largest ISP in Ireland is no exception and since 2005 I think I’ve had the same IP address assigned to me via ADSL, VDSL and now FTTH via PPPoE. One of the first things …

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Zerotier Controller on Mikrotik CHR

RouterOS DIsk Format Dialog Box

As of RouterOS 7.4Beta4 Mikrotik have added container functionality back in to RouterOS. I’ve had mixed experiences with containers over the years and never really took to them however, running them on RouterOS provides an excellent opportunity to add some functionality to RouterOS that’s missing. Most notable among these for me at least is the …

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Two Weeks with Starlink

I had almost forgotten that way back in February I had pre-ordered Starlink until I got an e-mail to say it was now available in Ireland and that I could pay the balance and they would ship Dishy to me. I completed the order. The following day I got an e-mail to say that Dishy …

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LTE Broadband 4G+ – Playing with LTE Bands

My fixed line broadband is VDSL supplied by Ireland’s largest Telco Eir. By and large I’m getting a pretty good service. I have a static IP so my eir F3000 modem (Sagemcom) is bridged so my PPPoE connection is handled by a Mikrotik RB3011. Occasionally however DSL resyncs itself and always at the most inopportune …

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FreeBSD HDMI Audio

I have multiple small form factor desktops that I used on a day to day basis. Each with their own Operating Systems. One is running Windows 10, one is running Manjaro Linux and on another I decided I was going to run a FreeBSD desktop. Just to be different! I have all the desktops connected …

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Mikrotik RouterOS: Simple Policy Based Routing

So let’s say you have multiple ISPs or different rules for VLAN traffic and you want a simple way to define which network routes through which gateway. In this example we have a routing table main and a routing table 4G Routing table main uses the default route which is a PPPoE connection on the same router. Routing table 4G uses a …

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Mikrotik RouterOS: VLANs

VLANs on RouterOS used to be a bit of a dark art and was very much dependant on the hardware. What worked on one might not work on another. Thankfully that has changed some time ago in the 6.3x releases and now there’s a standard way using bridge VLAN filtering. A quick note before we …

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