alias_neo

I've long had an idea that I should get my home automation to just print _something_ every couple of weeks to stop it clogging up.

It was recently fully clogged (Epson EcoTank) and I managed to get it back to fully printing after about 10 rounds of head cleaning, so it's not a huge deal, but how many home printers are really printing regularly these days.

Ours gets used maybe once per quarter, and I actively encourage the kids to just photocopy, in colour, random stuff whenever they want to be sure it doesn't just clog up.

Maybe; if you were asleep for 13.5 of them.

Maybe it was just a mistake and they intended to generate a `--bitsize 4` thinking it was in kilobyte units.

shrug

I think they're just absolutely inept and should never be trusted with anything security related as an organisation if this is a mistake they could make.

Because you have no choice. Often times you run your backend on someone else's computer (the cloud) and they need the key(s) they need in order to access the other services your application needs to do its job.

Late stage capitalism at its finest; protect the profits at all costs.

Thankfully, they clarified they're in Europe, so GDPR prevents them from ignoring known leaked credentials, lest they have that to deal with, on top of the revenue loss they'll make when all of their customers eventually find out: "they ran leaked credentials knowing our data was at risk, but decided to suck it and see".

It's not recoverable unfortunately, seems either the firmware is broken or a hardware issue. The last time it worked I factory reset it to see if that would stabilise it, but it never booted again. I contacted Amazon about replacing it, but they won't do anything because it's not registered to my account (because it was removed when I reset it).

I was also running Projectivy [sic] Launcher, but it launched a minute after the stick started which wasn't a great UX so I ended up disabling it because it annoyed the family.

Either way, I'm not worried about recovering it now; it would have been nice to use it for a few thing, but when it stopped working I just went out and bought a new TV.

They (Android TV devices, mine was a FireStick 4K Max) also don't give a fuck about displaying things that are inappropriate; ours showed banners for horror films on several occasions, during the day when my children are about and scaring them.

It's much harder to switch out the launcher on a FireStick, but I did manage it briefly before it started boot looping right around 1yr of ownership, so it's e-waste now.

Sorry, I somehow skipped over that.

I've been looking at upgrading to 10Gb myself, currently my top contenders are Mikrotik and Ubiquiti.

Mikrotik is much more reasonably priced, but I already have mostly Ubiquiti equipment so I'd probably spend the extra to keep the single-pane-of-glass for maintenance, something simple like the Flex XG / Flex 10 GbE so long as it can run my VLANs.

> What kind of trouble did you have with ASUS and D-Link? Security or the lack of configuration options? Haven't bought them in a while, but I remember them being somewhat decent.

I should caveat all of my opinion with the fact that I stopped buying this stuff the best part of a decade ago when I decided to go open source, so things may very well have changed in that time.

My experience with a particular manufacturer I won't name, which provides solar panel monitoring and optimisation equipment that I have installed at home suggests otherwise though, it's bad to the point of being unsure if I should laugh or cry.

Anyway, my experience back then was that Netgear and ASUS stuff was generally overpriced, performed reasonably though not amazingly well but had support dropped within 2-3 years and were left with severe vulnerabilities.

D-Link I found lacked features, performed generally weaker than the others, and were lucky to get any updates.

I can't recommend anything these days because I haven't used any in a long while, so my old-timer advice is moot. If I had to pick a branch of off-the-shelf to buy today because I was forced to it'd probably be Ubiquiti.

That said, I'm a dev in the communications-security space, my requirements are a little different to my family and friends, I have static IPs, lots of hosted stuff, and a low risk-appetite for vulns on my network, while a typical household will have a dynamic IP, unlikely to be hosting much if anything and so their attack surface is lower.

What's likely to be my next move personally? I currently run a Protectli box with about 90% more power than I need for my 1Gb network and 1Gb/1Gb WAN, but the NICs (5 Intel NICs) are the limiting factor, I'll likely buy something similar with 10Gb when the time comes and carry on running OPNSense and hopefully Coreboot.

I did that once or twice, but I got fed up of finding the correct hardware revision of a particular router that supports OpenWRT, and I much prefer OPNSense anyway, and it runs on commodity hardware that you have full control over.

It really depends on what you need from it; a cheap L2 switch will do the job, but frankly, you can get a Ubiquti Flex Mini with 5x1Gb ports for £35, I have a bunch of them around the house, and they're semi-managed so I can do VLANs on them and power them over PoE; since I'm already running Unifi, don't see the point cheaping out on switches.

I also have a bunch of EdgeMAX because I use the L3 features, they were more expensive, and that range is sadly now discontinued, but the Unifi equipment have all been workhorses, and the only think I've ever had fail in the past decade was an EdgeRouter Lite, the power circuitry failed after some dodgy mains voltage issues in my previous home.

Your experience seems to indicate that even their APs are a mess; while I applaud your effort to solve this, "I'm too old for this shit" is where I'm at now when it come to my home network, I (and my wife and kids) just want it to work so I've spent a fair chunk of change on it.

Uniquiti APs are fine, they've been reliable for me; I have one AP that's nearly a decade old and still going strong, and I just swap them out or extend coverage when a new generation comes along, and move the older ones to where stronger/newer wifi isn't needed. If I wasn't in the Unifi ecosystem which keeps my life simple, I'd probably look at Ruckus or maybe see whether Mikrotik have anything compelling yet.

As it stands; the Unifi Server I'm self-hosting keeps them up-to-date and optimised, so I just plug in an AP, adopt it and forget about it, it gets configured automatically and away we go; that's about the amount of involvement I want these days.

Coincidentally, I need an extra AP for my Steam Frame to use it away from the dongle in an area where I currently don't have good WiFi coverage, so I'm going to pick one (probably a 7-Pro or 7-Pro-XG) up and just plug it in to an ethernet port in the room in question, wait a couple of minutes and be ready to roll.

As in the others that I _won't_ buy (which is what I meant)?

I wouldn't buy Netgear, Asus, D-Link again. My ISP gave me Eero and I've never connected it, far too much Amazon crap going on there (but I have to keep it if I want the ISP to provide support).

Gl.iNet has been OK for the price but re-flash it with vanilla OpenWRT because their OS has some dubious phone home stuff (or did last time I looked at it).

Honestly, in terms of routers, I'm never likely to use something off-the-shelf again a decent box with Intel NICs that can run OPNSense and preferably run Coreboot (or similar). If I did go with something COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf), I'd look at Mikrotik.

I'm not a massive fan of Ubiquiti but I have their APs and I've had a bunch of their EdgeMAX switches (sadly discontinued when some of their best devs left), and their APs have been solid for me for the best part of a decade.

The advantage of using dedicated components is that each can be chosen according to your requirements.

Step one is not to buy TP-Link routers.

I know people have limited budgets, but having seen the code that sits on these devices and how poor quality and easily exploited it is, time and time again, I'll never buy TP-Link (amongst others) again.

For a while I collected a graveyard of routers that had been abandoned by the manufacturers (and contained serious vulnerabilities), with the intention of writing them all up one day; next thing you know I have two children rapidly reaching double-digit ages, and much better things to do with my life than write about how shitty the code is on actual products we buy every day.

I switched, about 7-8 years ago to a Protectli box running Coreboot and OPNSense and haven't looked back; I use Ubiquiti APs and switches. I'm not saying they're the best, but anything used in corporate/enterprise is going to have better support (if not better code quality).

The great thing about Ubiquiti APs for me is that each new WiFi generation (or two) I can just buy a few more, snap the existing APs off of the various ceilings they're attached to, snap on the new ones, adopt them, and away we go.

There seems to be several levels of compatibility, at least here in the UK, based on age.

My home is 1930s, it's fuse, in the black Bakelite housing typical of the era was insufficient and we were missing a incoming breaker to/from grid, those were updated. Our meter is much more recent, though still dated; allegedly it would have worked but it wasn't a smart meter, which we wanted so we had that updated.

I've also heard through my many hours of watching Solar videos on YT before our install that some breakers, RCDs(?), RCBOs(?), whichever it is, aren't always suitable for bidirectional current flow, so that's a possible issue too.

All of that is aside the "suicide cord" danger of the old generator method, but that's gone now with modern tech, the output is cut before you can get your hands on the contacts on the end of a plug.

It's just been legalised here in the UK, and I think it will help people with their bills, but the key is to keep installation costs down; if it's DIY you can look at a decent ROI time, but with the cost of trades-people these days, if you have to call out a sparky to inspect before you plug it in, you've added potentially years to your payback period.

At ~800W, I think on the whole we'll be fine; the equipment in our homes has got much more efficient over the years, and our homes were mostly built for times where we were using higher powered devices. If you can draw over a kW to power an electric heater or kettle, I don't see why feeding a mere 800W back in would be a huge risk.

Disclaimer: I'm not an Electrician, but I do have a degree in Electronic Engineering.