Digital independence doesn’t have to be an “all or nothing” mission. During last year’s Chaos Communication Congress the “Digital Independence Day” was announced to the general public. Supported by various organisations, it tries to convince people to move away from platforms owned by Big Tech (e.g. WhatsApp, Amazon, Facebook and the like) and switch to alternatives. This addresses concerns about data privacy and sovereignty, as well as the dominance of US-based platforms. It does not necessarily mean to self-host everything on cheap virtual machines or at home. In this blog post I will try to give an overview of services I use or run by myself (and why I choose them).

It started with a simple idea: what if everything in our data center was routed - not just the core-routers and -switches, but the access layer and the hosts too? So that’s exactly what we did. No VXLAN, no EVPN, no fancy overlays - just plain Layer 3.

A while ago our landlord got our old gas heater replaced with a newer gas condensing heating system (specifically a Bosch GC7000F). Unexpectedly it came along with a voucher for a free Bosch internet gateway (Bosch Connect-Key K 30 RF). Even more unexpectedly I received the gateway only a few weeks after registering online. However, that turned out to be sort of a bummer quite quickly. In short: this gateway has no local endpoint whatsoever and only submits data encrypted to Bosch systems. You may access the data through their HomeCom app (iOS, Android) but that’s about it. Their support has confirmed there are no immediate plans to changes this. Some more information can be found in this Github issue.

A while ago my work team was assigned the task to migrate one firewall generator into a different one. Output were iptables rules for Linux servers in both cases. As we wanted to ensure a smooth transition, we were looking for a way to actually test the new rulesets before being deployed into production. A little bit of googling did not yield any results, so we came up with our own solution.

Recently, I stumbled across this brilliant Mastodon thread about 50 things to do with a software defined radio (SDR) by @blinry. Specifically this Toot about utility meters and Wireless M-Bus got me thinking about my own water meter. It is a rather recent model with a digital display and the display also shows a little RF symbol! I never put much thought into that, but seeing how it easy it might be to aquire data from the meter I thought I should give it a try.

Back in 2018 when I bought my first Unifi accesspoint for use at home, I set up a small Debian Stretch VM at my favourite hoster to run the Unifi Controller, nowadays known as the Unifi Network Server/Application. Back then, it was mostly “install Debian, install MongoDB, add the Unifi Repository and install the unifi package”.

My first encounter with Ansible was at a conference in Berlin during a talk given by the great Jan-Piet Mens in 2014. The only automation tool I had been using up until then was Puppet (not counting homegrown Bash scripts here). For the last ten years Ansible has been a constant in my toolbox, both work-related and private. The following points convinced me back in 2014:

Backups are important. They already were important before the days of ransomware. I operate multiple virtual (public) Linux servers and also have a Synology NAS at home and I would like to keep backups of any valuable data these systems hold.

Automating Ganeti is easily possible through its RAPI Interface. While that allows control over the cluster and its instances it is not very well suited to source events (unless you do constant polling and track state elsewhere). Luckily Ganeti features a hook system which allows the execution of arbitrary scripts/binaries upon events.

Building a new virtualisation cluster will require spending money on hardware at some point. To avoid underutilisation, unwanted overbooking or extremely unbalanced resource usage you need to make some decisions early on and then calculate based on those.