Jun 08, 2023
I recently bought four Netgear WAC104 devices, and am flashing OpenWRT onto them.
I have struggled a lot to get the firmware on, due to the not great interface they provide.
The issue is, that it prompts you to change the password, but then when you change it on the page you land on, nothing connects anymore and you can't access the router.
The solution is to click "Set Password" in the Administration menu on the left, and set it there.
Even though there is a prompt to set the password on every page, that will change other settings too and break things.
The router isn't great, and the software is awful so thats why I'm installing OpenWRT anyway.
Two down, two more to go!
Jun 07, 2023
This week I finally got a machine that is solely to run pfSense.
I didn't want to spend _too_ much money so I bought a $200.00 Qotom Firewall Q330G4.
This was great and easy to set up.
First I bought a Netgear WAC104 and installed OpenWRT on it. Simple enough.
Then I put that into bridge mode, so it's just an Access Point and not a "smart" router too.
Then I put my Linksys EA9300 into bridge mode and behind the pfSense machine (into a switch) and couldn't access any of my server's sites.
After futzing with that for a couple days, I finally figured out the problem.
I thought I was behind a double NAT, but I wasn't. When I moved my EA9300 from my sole WiFi router, to behind the pfSense machine, I neglected to change some settings on my AT&T modem.
You see — dear reader— when I set up this network on my AT&T Modem, I had to enable Passthrough mode.
This, was set to a MAC Address, not an IP Address.
So when I was making sure to keep my IP network on the same 192.168.1.1/24, I thought that was all I needed.
Alas, there's a dropdown to pick the MAC address of the machine that everything passes through.
I can now access my bookmarks, notes, ebooks, and plex server!
Thanks to my friend Daniel (@sanitybit) - who was a great rubber duck and gave me some pointers when I was debugging, and also helped me find the hardware for the pfSense box!
May 26, 2023
I haven't had much time lately for blog posts, I've been dealing with bed time routines with my newborn, and once those are done, I get a few hours of alone time for computer things.
Lately I've been toying around with Amiga OS, FreeDOS, Windows 95, and Apple IIe things.
I got a raspberry pi and installed Pimiga, got a fun set up and that was neat. I then installed Amiberry on my macbook, with some remote hard drive images on my samba share, and I have a consistent setup for Amiga on any machine in the house or on tailscale.
I then decided to install FreeDOS to a barely used Dell Vostro 1720 and install to that. It works great, I have WordStar, TurboC, and more installed and it's fun to get back to my roots in that way.
After that I decided to install Windows 95 with 86Box, did the same with remote hard disk images, and got that running. Been toying around in Visual Basic 6, Oh the memories!! I installed that so I could play Lego City, but having voodoo graphics errors I need to figure out before I can play.
I also ordered an Apple IIe emulator machine that runs on an Esp8266 from CT6502 and it works great. So cool just tossing a disk image on the MicroSD card and loading it up. The downside to this is I can't figure out how to swap disks in realtime, so I can't play Ultima, or any multi disk games. I can however load .hdv files so if something comes with a hard disk image.
Not really much for a tech post, and nothing to share codewise, but thought I'd break some radio silence. I also imported my flying blog here, so I added the Flying category/tags.
May 26, 2023
I made a mistake with not reading CHANGELOGs for all my packages in Neovim this week. This sent me down a small rabbit hole trying to fix all the things.
What happened is I ran :PackerUpdate which, pulls the latest version of Packer packages, good, updates! But... Telescope has a new requirement on main branch that requires Neovim 0.9.0. The problem is that the latest NixPkgs for Neovim right now is 0.8.1. I ran to google, tried to set an overlay to use neovim-nightly, but that didn't work. If you recall in Dotfiles - My 2022 Way I'm not actually using NixOS so (please correct me if I'm wrong) overlays don't work. I tried specifing a version in my programs.nix, I tried a bunch of other things at 1AM that I don't remember anymore.
Almost ripped it all out just to use Nvim 0.9.0 on this machine until NixPkgs has updated the repo. I decided that was the wrong idea, and went to sleep.
Tonight, I was able to figure out that in Packer, you can pin a commit!
It's clear in the docs, but I was trying to fix it at the Nix level, so I didn't immediately think of this, even though at my last job, Tidelift, I was doing package pinning analysis! Derp.
So, I added commit="c1a2af0" to my use statment in plugins.lua and Telescope started working again without a warning, or issue. Commit.
That wasn't the only problem though. In my infinite wisdom, I followed some reddit posts that I won't link to, that suggested deleting ~/.local/share/nvim and rerunning PackerInstall, the problem there -- my tree-sitter configs are in my nix files.
This is an issue I need to look at later, but in my programs.nix file, I some reason have two entries of plugins =. I had to uncomment the first one where I inject tree-sitter, and comment out the second setting. Then rebuild my nix flakes.
After that,I had to comment the first, uncomment the second, and rebuild with withAllGrammars config.
This worked, I had my rust tree-sitter configs working, but was missing rust-analyzer.
That's in Mason! So I ran :Mason, found rust-analyzer slapped that i button, and I finally had my system back after 2 days of issues.
This was mostly a blogpost so I can reference back to it in the future, but hopefully at least _someone_ learns to pin your dang nvim Packages!