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Comment on Let's talk about free/FOSS routing platforms for the homelab

MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

You’re right, I should have thought a bit more before I answered. Thinking about it, double NAT doesn’t achieve anything. With that said, the main way in which this is a problem is if one were to forward ports, in which case they’d need to forward ports from both firewalls.

Yes, I will be dealing with firewalls on both appliances.

I too will be investing more into Zigbee in the future, but having a central controller with MQTT can help. I haven’t decided if I want to go completely without WiFi. There’s certainly security considerations to going to Zigbee. Like you, I do not plan to utilise many proprietary IOT solutions and buy into the massive appliances being controlled with outdated software. I’ll stick to dumb appliances as much as I can.

I don’t think it’s particularly malicious either, but the problem I have is that it is essentially at ring 0. As such, my OS can’t do anything about it, which means I’m going to have to find alternatives to deal with it. I would have loved to have every device have a FOSS bootloader but I suppose that’s a long way away.

Thanks for your comment.

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h3ndrik@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Zigbee

Sure. I think Zigbee/Matter are proprietary standards. And you don’t have too much control over how it is implemented in the individual devices and any possible security vulnerabilities. It is a separate network though and easy to use. I bought a small Gateway to connect it to Home Assistant after the USB stick I was initially using showed some compatibility issues.

What I really like are those cheap chinese devices that have ESP8266 or ESP32 microcontrollers in them. I can flash Tasmota or Esphome on them, take control and have them run free software. No manufacturer’s cloud needed and updates indefinitely.

Yeah, and we recently talked about smart/dumb appliances. In this household there are lots of older appliances anyways. And we moved a few years ago so they’re just old enough that none of them have wifi. I think that has changed since. Nowadays it’s not an extra 150€ for wifi anymore, but part of most appliances. And you get an App along with your new diswasher per default. I like “smart” with lighting. And having the washing machine turn on 2h before I get home is a huge convenience. Apart of that, I’d like the heating unit to be smart, but it isn’t. I think we could save some energy if the gas heating stopped after everyone left. There is no steady weekly schedule I could program into the central unit, so it’s just some radiators I can turn down. Apart from that, I don’t think I have a good use-case for a smart diswasher, fridge or a bugging device that can play music.

[Intel ME] it is essentially at ring 0

I don’t like it either. It’s just a very stupid design choice to have some uncontrollable extra chips run god knows what with highest privileges. And in the past people already discovered several security vulnerabilities. And there is no alternative to it. I think AMD does the same. And coreboot is a bit niche. I’d have to put quite some effort in and make some trade-offs.

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- MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t think Zigbee is proprietary, but I might have missed something. Like you, I also really like the ESP controllers that I can get and run my own code/mature projects on them (this is for both Zigbee and WiFi versions)
  
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  - h3ndrik@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You’re right. Both standards are open. I got confused by the German Wikipedia article about Matter which is very misleading.
    
    I have 2 thermostats but that’s not enough for the rooms. And I’m not entirely happy with them. Maybe I need to find a good model and buy some more.
    
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