Author Archives: James

Outdoor Movie Theater Audio with Consumer and Professional Gear

Posted by on 5/13/2020 No comments

Audio really makes an amazing difference when it comes having people over for an outdoor movie night. At the end of last year, I ended up with a 5.1 surround sound setup using powered speakers, most of which were of good quality.

It took a number of years to get there though. The setup has always used powered speakers, because I had two from college to start it out. As the years went by, it went from stereo, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and then finally 5.1. A lot of the gear was re-used, but not all of it. I also tried to do this as cheaply as possible.

One last note that I’ll repeat again later, I really do not find much of a difference with this setup between a 4.0 and a 5.1 setup. In my opinion, you really do not gain much with a center speaker or a subwoofer.

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Watching your 3D printer on AndroidTV with OctoPrint

Posted by on 5/9/2020 No comments

In my household, I have AndroidTV installed on every TV in the house, including the one in my office. I have also recently had to move the 3D printer to my basement due to all the noise and now working from home full time. I wanted a solution where I could start a print and be able to keep it on screen to make sure everything is going well, without having to watch it on my laptop or phone.

The solution that I can up with was quiet nice and works nice with an AndroidTV solution I’m already using for some of the cheap Foscams I use already.

The solution that I have is using OctoPrint, Logitech C270 webcam, an AndroidTV streaming device, and the excellent tinyCam PRO Android application.

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Upgrading the Monoprice Maker Ultimate / Duplicator 6 to Marlin 2.0.x

Posted by on 5/7/2020 No comments

In this guide, I will be walking through how I upgraded my Monoprice Maker Ultimate to Marlin 2.0.x using the pre-built version offered by dot-bob. The installation in this scenario would be upgrading from Marlin 1.1.x that was installed previously and using the Firmware Updater plugin in Octoprint.

Here is the current setup I have:

  • Firmware: Marlin 1.1.x
    • This was also using dot-bob’s 1.1.x firmware that I upgraded the original firmware to when it arrived
  • Octoprint version 1.4.0 that is installed on a Raspberry Pi. It is connected to the 3d printer using a USB cable.
    • Octoprint has an Octopi image that can be burned onto an sdcard to get you up quickly in their downloads section.
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EdgeRouter and Cincinnati Bell IPv6 Setup

Posted by on 10/14/2019 No comments

I had covered setting up the Ubiquiti UniFi USG with IPv6 in a previous article. I recently had someone ask me about the EdgeRouter Lite setup and having issues, so I decided to pull mine out of storage and try it out.

The good news is, if you follow the guide starting at Chapter 3 using the Basic Wizard, it all just works! I was using EdgeRouter Lite version 1.9.1.

Using Setup Wizards – Basic Setup

Enable DHCPv6 PD and leave the default settings. It should look like this in the setup:

Enable DHCPv6 PD on Basic Setup

With that, you will will be assigned a /128 for your router and be assigned a /56 address space. The EdgeRouter will pull a /64 for each of of the LANs for assignment to your devices from that /56.

EdgeRouter Dashboard view of networks
Macbook Client View
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Monitoring IPv6 vs IPv4 traffic on Ubiquiti USG with SNMP

Posted by on 3/21/2019 2 comments

So. This has been painful. I decided I wanted to view how much traffic is flowing in and out of my USG now that I have IPv6!!!! It must be crazy, so let me go look. And then the painful truth, the USG controller has no visuals or commands to find the information. Bummer.

After a lot of web browsing, researching, additional hair loss, crying, and help, I have found the solution. I am going to turn on SNMP on the Ubiquiti USG, install telegraf, influxdb, and grafana on my Ubuntu 18.04 server.

This should be easy, right? No.
What could go wrong? A whole whole lot.

Setting up SNMP

I’m going to skip most the heartburn I had of trying to find the correct OIDs, getting the names correct, and ultimately realizing that Ubuntu does not load the MIBs in by default, so you have to do it by hand. Here’s what I did though:

# apt-get install snmp-mibs-downloader libsnmp-base libsnmp-dev snmp
# cd /usr/share/snmp/mibs
# wget http://dl.ubnt-ut.com/snmp/UBNT-MIB
# wget http://dl.ubnt-ut.com/snmp/UBNT-UniFi-MIB

Now, I did something bad, but since this is pretty limited, I loaded all of the MIBs in by default. My /etc/snmp/snmp.conf file looks like this:

# As the snmp packages come without MIB files due to license reasons, loading
# of MIBs is disabled by default. If you added the MIBs you can reenable
# loading them by commenting out the following line.
# mibs :
mibs +ALL

Setting up InfluxDB

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Static IPv6 Hostnames on Ubiquiti USG

Posted by on 3/19/2019 2 comments

Yet another update for how I keep updating Ubiquiti to work with IPv6. In this case, I want to update my hosts so that they will use IPv6 locally when using their domain names. Even though my authoritative DNS server has the AAAA records setup correctly, because I had updated Ubiquiti to use the local IP on the USG, it would not return values for my servers. Here’s how I fixed that issue, in a not great way. I’m currently on controller version 5.10.19.

Let’s assume the following:

  • Domain: somelab.us
  • Host: someserver
  • IPv4: 192.168.1.15
  • IPv6 (Fake): 2606:1101:6412:fd00:223b:4911:2314:7843

The first thing to do is make sure that dnsmasq is turned on as the DHCP server. This can be found in “Settings” -> “Services” -> DHCP. Just make sure “Use dnsmasq as DHCP server” is turned on.

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New Home

Posted by on 3/18/2019 No comments

The blog has officially moved to the new home of ScribblingBrain. I figured that reflects the scribbles of this blog as mental notes for myself most times. The main reason that I’m moving away from using the old domain for web content is it was the only subdomain used from jamesandkristin.net, the URL was really long, and the fact that people misspelled my wife’s name a lot.

I did manage to get it setup with a wildcard, so that old the URLs still redirect to the relevant pages. In case you were curious how, I used the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^james\.jamesandkristin\.net$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http\:\/\/www\.scribblingbrain\.com\/$1 [R=301,L]

IPv6 on Cincinnati Bell Fioptics with VLANs using Ubiquiti USG

Posted by on 3/6/2019 3 comments

Cincinnati Bell Fioptics has recently started the deployment of IPv6 through the network. Luckily, we will be allowed to pull a /56 prefix.

A bit of a warning, but the /56 prefix is not sticky to you. If your network connection becomes disconnected for long enough (as of this writing it is 7 days), you could be assigned a new /56. Also, if you put a new device on with a different MAC, you will get a different /56 prefix.

Another note is DNS. You will not be getting AAAA records for the DNS servers. DNS queries will continue to go to their DNS servers using IPv4 addresses. This is fine. You will still get AAAA IPv6 addresses when available for domain names when available, just the communication to get that AAAA is over IPv4. Since you will be dual stack, having both IPv4 and IPv6, there will be no issues.

Current Environment

My network setup currently is as follows:

  • Connections
    • ONT is connected to the USG eth0 ethernet port (WAN)
  • Interfaces
    • WAN1
    • VLAN 1: Management
    • VLAN 2: Home Network
    • VLAN 3: DMZ Network
    • VLAN 4: Guest Network
  • Hardware / Software
    • Model: UniFi Security Gateway 3P
    • Version: 4.4.36.5146617
    • Controller Version: 5.10.20
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Fioptics TV service with Ubiquiti Setup

Posted by on 12/20/2018 2 comments

At this point, these are more notes for fixing it between upgrades. I use this so that I can hook my UniFi Security Gateway 3P directly up to the ONT and allow all video services to work correctly on my network, with VLANs.

There are too many references to remember on how I built this over the years, but a lot comes from multiple articles on DSL reports, along with things friends have done over time.

My Home Setup

I have multiple networks setup at my house, but in this scenario I will be using my “Home” network, which has the following details:

  • Network Name: Home
  • VLAN: 2
  • Subnet: 192.168.1.1/24

I have the following equipment in my home also that will be used for video:

  • UniFi Security Gateway 3P
  • UniFi Switch 24
  • Actiontec 5240 MoCA Adapters
    • One of my STB has access to Coax, but no Ethernet, so I use a MoCA adapter being my switch and another in front of the Cable Box)
  • Amino Cable Box
    • Entone and ZTE Cable Boxes could be used also. Those have MoCA built in, which reduces the need for a MoCA adapter connected to the Cable Box.
    • An additional note. The Amino Cable Box is wireless, but requires WPS to sync up. Ubiquiti does not support WPS, so they will need to be connected up with Ethernet (or a MoCA adapter).
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IPv6 on Time Warner with VLANs using OpenWrt

Posted by on 1/25/2015 No comments

I’ve retired the old Linksys e3000 running TomatoUSB and have replaced it with a ZyXEL NBG6716 802.11AC router that is running OpenWrt Chaos Calmer.  One of the things I was never able to get to work on the e3000 with Tomato-USB was getting each of the four VLANs an IPv6 subnet.  I could only seem to pull down a /64 from Time Warner, which would then get assigned automatically to my first VLAN.  The good news is, I am now running with a /56 assignment from Time Warner with each VLAN assigned a /64.

My current setup looks like:

  • ZyXEL NBG6716 AC router
  • OpenWrt Chaos Calmer r43762 (snapshot of trunk at the time)

So, to start out, make sure you have the following software packages installed:

  • ip6tables
  • ip6tables-extra
  • kmod-8021q
  • kmod-ip6tables
  • kmod-ipv6
  • odhcp6c
  • (optional) luci-proto-ipv6

Setup WAN

At this point, I configured the WAN interfaces to pull an IPv6 address (Network -> Interfaces).  Edit the WAN6 interface to update the following settings:

  • General Setup Tab
    • Protocol: DHCPv6 client
    • Request IPv6-address: try
    • Request IPv6-prefix of length: 56
  • Advanced Settings Tab
    • Bring up on boot: checked
    • Use builtin IPv6-management: checked
    • Use default gateway: checked
    • Use DNS servers advertised by peer: check (even though TW hasn’t passed IPv6 DNS servers to me yet)
  • Physical Settings Tab
    • Bridge interfaces: unchecked
      • Interface: “Ethernet Adapter: “eth1”
  • Firewall Settings
    • Create / Assign firewall-zone: wan

Create VLANs

Now create the VLANs that you want to use (Network -> Switch).  Make sure that each of the VLANs you create are tagged for the CPU.  In my setup, I have the VLANS: Management, Home, Guest, DMZ.

Create Interfaces for the VLANs

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