Oh geez, I’ve not written anything on here since last November. Oops.
Just chiming in to say I’m still alive, and I’ve done some minor work on the primary portable setup and have working secondary setups.
The primary setup that lives in the Pelican 1450 is still the Mikrotik hAP ac2 that is back running RouterOS – more on that shortly. I also migrated the NUC to Hyper-V which has worked out pretty well so far.
I went back to RouterOS on the hAP because I wanted to migrate my site-to-site VPNs back to IPsec for compatibility’s sake. I get effectively line rate between my home and the data center I have hosted gear at, and the hAP ac2 has IPsec acceleration, which brings it up to around 150 Mbps. That’s plenty of speed considering how inconsistent LTE can be.
Right, the secondary setups. The one of these that gets the most use is a GL.iNet Creta that lives in a smaller Pelican case long with a Chromecast. I’ve taken copious short business trips over the past couple of years, and having something that is significantly smaller to shove in a suitcase is helpful, doubly so if it’s not checked luggage. Considering these trips are just me using it with my work laptop, and sometimes my personal laptop too, I’ve been able to use an aircard or hotel WiFi with good results. It’s worked out quite nicely so far.
The other secondary one is a GL.iNet Mudi that lives in my work backpack. This is mostly for 100% ad-hoc setups on conference room tables or vehicles. Works well in a pinch!
Both secondary setups connect back to the data center using WireGuard which is just fine considering how simple the setups are. After all, neither of them have a server behind them…
Do note that the impetus to have a “complete network” in a portable format was because at AWA in 2019 the data center firewall went down for a little bit and we lost DNS until I quickly swapped over to OpenDNS and put a ticket in. The DC’s staff got things back up and running pretty quickly, which was good, if a little annoying.
Anyway, things have been working quite nicely overall. LTE has been quite good in many locations, which is awesome. Bodes well for future adventures.
Until next time!