• 1 Post
  • 77 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
rss



  • A VLAN is (theoretically) equivalent to a physically separated layer 2 domain. The only way for machines to communicate between vlans is via a gateway interface.

    If you don’t trust the operating system, then you don’t trust that it won’t change it’s IP/subnet to just hop onto the other network. Or even send packets with the other network’s header and spoof packets onto the other subnets.

    It’s trivially easy to malform broadcast traffic and hop subnets, or to use various arp table attacks to trick the switching device. If you need to segregate traffic, you need a VLAN.

    Edit: Should probably note that simply VLAN tagging from the endpoints on a trunk port isn’t any better than subnetting, since an untrusted machine can just tag packets however it wants. You need to use an 802.1q aware switch and gateway to use VLANs effectively.
















  • The answer to your overarching question is not “common maintenance procedures”, but “change management processes”

    When things change, things can break. Immutable OSes and declarative configuration notwithstanding.

    OS and Configuration drift only actually matter if you’ve got a documented baseline. That’s what your declaratives can solve. However they don’t help when you’re tinkering in a home server and drifting your declaratives.

    I’m pretty certain every service I want to run has a docker image already, so does it matter?

    This right here is the attitude that’s going to undermine everything you’re asking. There’s nothing about containers that is inherently “safer” than running native OS packages or even building your own. Containerization is about scalability and repeatability, not availability or reliability. It’s still up to you to monitor changelogs and determine exactly what is going to break when you pull the latest docker image. That’s no different than a native package.


  • Depends on the specific Zigbee switch, but generally yes.

    The magic is in the fact that you can decouple the relay, and use the switch as a sensor that triggers things that may or may not be related to the physical switch position.

    The other reason I like it better than a typical “smart switch” is that I can use the shellys with whatever switch I want, so I can have it match my dumb switches and use different colors.