Back in 2021 I started to tag posts with Home network v2, and wrote about my plans to improve my home network. The year after — there was even an updated plan!

Then it evolved into a series, with the following description:

My home network 2.0 started with me replacing all my Unifi switches for MikroTik — and looking for a new router. Then followed a lot of network cabling and Wi-Fi improvements, and wrapping up with some IPv6.

TLDR; I’m taking my home network to the next level.

Now — five years and 17 posts later — I don’t really have any idea where I am going with this… I’m continuously improving my home network. That is a big part of my homelab hobby, a never-ending story.

So; keeping a Home network v2 tag, or series, feels a bit off. Let’s wrap this thing up.

After some trial and error I’m ready to try out the notes section on my Hugo blog. I’ve been thinking about this for a while — and this time it might just work. More changes than anticipated were needed to allow for no title — lists, RSS, OG image…

I like how @kev@fosstodon.org is doing his notes, and my implementation is inspired by that.

My goal is to reduce friction when posting a project update, while still using my own website.

When we bought the Hero Camper we opted for having exterior lights installed, one in each corner of the roof-rack, with a simple controller inside the cabin.

The two rear lights were facing backwards, while the two in the front were facing out to each side. This left a dark area in front of the camper.

So far we have mostly used the red (the lights have red and yellow in addition to regular lights) to find the camper when parked at a dark campsite. Having a “blind-spot” in front was a bit annoying.

I initially planned to get two more lights and face them forwards, but that left me with a dilemma. There are only four channels on the controller, how to wire two additional lights?

It turned out I didn’t actually need more lights, I just needed to adjust the ones I have differently 🙂

A home office can’t just be all fun and games; there needs to be some wine too.

I’ve wanted a wine cabinet for a while. I often pick up a few bottles of red wine when I’m out travelling but have had no good place to store them.

The basement is typically an ideal place to store wine, but our basement is warm all year round, as it has my home office and homelab rack.

A wine cabinet was the obvious choice, but how to fit one? My home office is already pretty crammed…

Back in 2021 I added Home Assistant sensor data to our Dakboard monitor. But I did so using a long-lived access token directly on the Dakboard blocks — which is not great for a couple of reasons:

• Tokens have no access scope, meaning they grant full admin access to everything
• The token was stored on Dakboard’s servers

I want Dakboard to be able to pull data from my locally hosted Home Assistant, but I’d like to restrict access.

I did this using Caddy as a reverse proxy 🤓

I use Beszel to monitor all my hosts — Raspberry Pi’s, hypervisors, VMs and containers. But a problem arises if the Proxmox host running the Beszel container stops working.

There are two mechanisms in place that makes sure I get notified in case there is a problem with a Proxmox host or Beszel itself. The first is heartbeat monitoring within Beszel itself, should Beszel stop sending out pings to Healthchecks.io — I get notified.

The second method is a health pulse script regularly executed on the Proxmox hosts themselves. Let’s have a look.

Hero camper recently announced their new Nested Drawer — it’s a small drawer that gets mounted above the cooler and holds the gas hob parts safely.

Which is pretty genius; the pan support is cast iron and quite heavy. Having all parts for the gas hob safely stored and easily available is a win 🎉

It was straightforward to install, but needed a little modification to improve the stability of the gas hob parts. Getting the cooler back in and connected afterwards was a bit of a challenge.

The kitchen space on our Hero Camper is limited — well, actually all space on the camper is limited, but this post is about the kitchen.

So we need to make the most of the three drawers in the kitchen — the top drawer is for cutlery and misc kitchen utilities. We looked at store-bought drawer dividers, but didn’t find anything that fit.

The dimensions of the drawer are probably somewhat unusual at 45.8 × 43.2 cm, meaning every divider we found left lots of unused space around it and just didn’t seem like a good solution. We didn’t want a plastic divider moving around as we were driving.

So we figured: we’ll make one — and so we did 😀

When we first got the camper I was confused by the low charge rate of the solar charger. In bulk it would charge just fine, but when in float — it would let the battery discharge to ~13V before re-entering bulk charging. That is far too low for a camper solar setup.

I found an online discussion regarding the EPEVER Tracer that explained the behavior. The settings are not well optimized for a solar system on a camper, where you want to utilize the sun as much as possible.

Keep it simple, stupid — less is more, or as Albert Einstein didn’t actually say:

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

What he actually said, according to Quote Investigator:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

But I digress… It’s not lost on me that I sometimes end up making things more complex than they have to be. Often without it adding any value. Like entropy — slowly increasing the state of disorder.