As the title says, we’re in the planning phase again. As I mentioned in the last post, I’m planning to make the case into a self-contained system requiring one single AC power cable (100-240v). Instead of using the ON100, however, I’m going to set a Fitlet3 up as a PoE-powered small hypervisor using Proxmox. The firewall VM will run OpenWrt and have a specific USB port passed through. It will also have a WiFi card passed through for WiFi client mode, reducing the need to carry the mini router for that.
I found out there’s an “assisted sysupgrade” package in OpenWrt that builds a configuration-specific firmware including installed packages, so upgrades are completely seamless. This is nice as WireGuard is not baseline on OpenWrt.
Other VMs will be a domain controller, a Pi-Hole, and maybe a Plex server. I’ve not figured out if this is absolutely necessary, considering the luck I’ve had with LTE, but we’ll see. I’ll need to figure out what subset of the existing library I want to have on it if I opt to run it.
If I stick to just the firewall VM, the DC, and the Pi-Hole, I won’t need very much space at all, but with how relatively cheap disk space is these days, I might as well have enough to account for the potential for some sort of local media server.
I’m still planning to use the SG250-08HP switch for everything, and while I could pick up another CBW150AX AP, the IgniteNet Spark AC Wave2 Mini should do nicely. Worse comes to it, I can throw the extenders in whatever luggage I’m taking on the trip, but considering the typical coverage needed, I think they won’t be necessary. I’ll keep them just in case, of course.
Considering I have no idea if I’ll be going on a business trip or to an anime con or a hamfest in the foreseeable future, this is another exercise in “why?” The answer is “because I can, and this is an ongoing project dating back twenty years.”
It’s hard to believe it’s been over twenty years since I registered this domain: how far we have come since then: from using a relatively heavy small-form-factor PC with a PCI WiFi card connected to a 2.4 GHz Yagi aimed out a hotel room window at skylights below it in 2006 to a mini router in a hotel room with a USB LTE aircard connected to it in 2024.
Hopefully, there will be many more years to come in this project: the next plan should be good for quite a few more years, and it should be easy enough to upgrade to a newer WiFi technology, and along those lines, newer cellular technology as well. For now, though, WiFi 5 and LTE is good enough for the case’s use.
Until next time!