The port is forwarded from your router to the pi, right? If so, you could test for the router as the bottleneck using the router’s WAN side IP address as the target.

This should give you a good data point for comparison. If it’s also slow then you can focus on the router performance. Some are slow when doing hairpin NAT.

I’d say your chances are very good. Even their high end rackmount models work with the usbhid-ups driver. Don’t think they would change things up in this regard since they would also need to change their software.

It’s probably still IPv6 related. If you use something like Network Analyzer on your phone while only connected to the mobile network you may find that it only shows an IPv6 address and DNS server, no IPv4 config. That could explain the difference. Particularly if you were using the maximum typically permissible MTU. Your provider might also be doing some 6to4 tunneling somewhere that adds overhead and causes size problems.

You might want to do a DNS leak test from your phone with the wireguard connection down and then with it up to make sure you’re tunneling DNS. This will be clearer if you set pihole to use something upstream that an ISP is unlikely to use - quad9 for example.

Btw: does anybody know what bad things actually happen if there is no metal cage that blocks all the radio?

Noise happens. Could be no problem, or it could hurt your wifi or mobile data connections, or maybe raise a neighbor’s ham radio noise floor. I saw this recently when setting up a pi to run BirdNet-Pi. The USB3 connection to an SSD caused enough noise in the 2.4GHz band that the onboard wifi radio could only connect on the 5GHz band.

To start - moving services from bare metal to rootless Podman containers running via quadlets. It’s something I have had in mind for a while but keep second guessing the distro choice. Long-ish release cadence, systemd-networkd and a recent Podman version in the native repos, well supported, and not Ubuntu.

So far openSUSE Leap seems like the winner. A testing machine is up to install everything, write some deployment scripts, and decide on a storage layout and partitioning scheme.

If anyone has another distro to recommend that checks these boxes let me know!

I like rolling release for the desktop, but only want critical patches in any given month for this server, and a major upgrade no more than every 3-4 years. Or an immutable server distro. But it doesn’t seem like networkd is an option for the ones I’ve looked at (Fedora CoreOS, openSUSE MicroOS), and I am not sure if I want to figure out Ignition/Combustion right now.

Next project - VLANs on Mikrotik.

OP - Navepoint makes good racks for reasonable money. I have a Pro series 9u from them and it went together without any problems. It’s on the wall with a pretty big ups in it.

If you want to keep using networkd, you might want to consider if multiple interfaces are causing the wait. NM doesn’t care, but networkd gives more granular options for dependencies. If you have wired and wireless and only one in use the systemd-networkd-wait-online.service waits for a timeout period. You can find lots of info on it related to boot delays with that service.

Try the --any switch on the systemd-networkd-wait-online.service launch configuration. This will tell the wait-online service that any single routable interface is enough, you don’t need them all.

Run:

sudo systemctl edit systemd-networkd-wait-online.service

That adds the override.conf for the service. Add these lines:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd-wait-online --any

The other possibility is if you have virtual .netdev devices configured (VPN, bridging, etc) and some of them are not essential for the machine to be online, you can set RequiredForOnline=no on the ones that aren’t essential.

It’s not bad to get running, and the alerting is really flexible. You can add Nagios and syslog alerts easily too.

Using it here. Love the flexibility and features.

I’m running NUT on the host os - no container. If that’s an option for you it will probably be much more reliable.

Huh. Losing USB access?

It’s not very exciting, but: Network UPS Tools (NUT).

Keep everything in good shape in the event of a power outage.

Here’s my messy-cabled 9u rack.

It has:

• Fiber gateway out of view on top of the rack.
• Switch, which also powers 2 Ruckus APs and 2 other switches.
• Mikrotik RB5009 router.
• Raspberry Pi x3 all running Debian Bookworm. I have too many pis right now, running Home Assistant, LibreNMS, Log collection, and a read-only NUT server that orchestrates shutdowns and startups on power loss. I need to consolidate these.
• 1L PCs. One is on Debian serving media and files. The other is a test server where I’m trying out Immich on openSUSE. I’m considering moving to that and rootless podman for services. To that end I have another of these 1L boxes on my desk trying other options (MicroOS, Fedora IoT, maybe others).
• HDs. These are backup drives for the 1L server. I keep them powered off except when needed.
• UPS and a managed, switched PDU.

Everything is set up for low energy consumption (~90w), remote admin, and recovery from power loss.

That and the shrinking ability to grant access to device storage. If that becomes an option only on rooted phones (which seems like the directly Google is heading) it will make the audience for such an app much smaller.

They already publish on F-Droid. It sounds like it was just a lot of built-up frustration from the last several years of Google blocking apps that require storage permissions and making it difficult to get restored to the Play store.

This was the bug from the last removal. They were going back and forth with Google unproductively for months. Hopefully the existing fork (which was also taken down from the Play store) can keep going on F-Droid.

Same here. Tried it out and it’s been great for a few months. I was just about to get some family members set up using it.

If you’re buying new cameras they’ll be 802.3af PoE. Passive is becoming much less common. So that model router I linked would work great.

I think if you’re a moderately technically inclined person you would be happy with that solution. If you are intimidated at the idea of writing or adapting some scripts, I would probably recommend a router on one of the other platforms plus a PoE switch.

The easiest part of your requirements are the custom DNS records. All of the platforms recommended so far can do this. OpenWRT has the advantage of WiFi capabilities. If you want the router to also be your WiFi access point then it may be your best option. But it sounds like you only need it to be a wired router, which is good.

As far as the ad blocking, I have done this with pi-hole, and with the built-in DNS and block capabilities of OpenWRT, Mikrotik and OPNSense. They are all fine. The router ones don’t have the fancy web UI like pi-hole. So if you use that a lot you will be disappointed. Mikrotik’s is the most basic and a new feature for them, but they are actively developing it. Plus their current routers can run containers, so you can run pi-hole on the router as a container if you want.

PoE ports as a requirement is what narrows your options considerably I think. You could get that from a separate switch. If you want that in the router itself then you have very few options.

Mikrotik has a lot of routers with PoE out. Their newest model in the RB5009 series can do either passive or 802.3af/at PoE out. Many of their older routers have passive PoE only. Make sure you know what your cameras need.

I had similar requirements as you and got this: https://mikrotik.com/product/rb5009upr_s_in

It has PoE out available on all 8 Ethernet ports. The default 48v power supply works with 802.3af/at PoE. It is a 96 watt supply, and can support ~76 watts of PoE downstream. If you need passive PoE then you would need to change to a 24v power supply.

Mikrotik RouterOS requires some learning to use its advanced features, but their quick setup defaults are good. And the platform is super reliable and flexible.

For DNS you would use their Adlist functionality along with a script similar to the one from BartoszP in this thread to enable DNS name resolution for lan hosts: https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=181640. That script is added to the DHCP server config to run when each client gets an address lease. And then you would add static name records in IP / DNS / Static for the other host.domain names you want your lan devices to connect to by name which can’t be resolved via your upstream DNS server.

Nice, I’ll check it out! I remember LMS and Squeezebox. Didn’t know it would sync between rooms, and I didn’t know it had been open sourced, that’s excellent.

At the time we started in the Sonos ecosystem we wanted easy, and it provided that. Now I’ve got multiple servers running, self-hosting services for the family, slowly working on removing our cloud service dependencies. So this would fit right in.

Yeah, I get what you’re saying. Definitely. It’s not complicated for one pair of speakers in one room. For one music source. For one person controlling it.

There just haven’t been any better cost-effective solutions with multi-room, control from your any phone convenience. And that’s a big plus for how we listen to music. Today there are a few contenders, but many of them are also cloud dependent. Really the small number of good options in this space is proof of how good Sonos was for a long time. Well and also of Spotify causing people ditch the idea of a offline digital music library.

Edit: And to be clear, aside from the “any computer networks” part, this is what the original Sonos device did. It could work without a home network, but worked best with a shared music library on a PC. Didn’t need cloud anything, internet connection, account, etc. You just hooked your normal speakers to it and it played music.