Ah yes that makes sense. I was taken aback by my latest install of freepbx. I feel it wasn’t as aggressive during the Digium days but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

I heard good things about free switch, although it seems like a paradigm change. I’ll have to check it out.

Interesting - why avoid asterisk?

I looked into fusion to play with but I’ve been using asterisk casually since like the 00s with no issues.

Excellent! Nice work.

I don’t know what dns rebind is but once DNS A records are pointed to the right place then it’s just a matter of setting up the rest of your stuff.

Is that expected? Otherwise check to make sure DNS settings for the domain are correct (eg ns records dig NS example.com IIRC).

First off - you don’t explicitly say so I just want to double check - you’re not using example.com as the actually domain correct?

If not the next thing to do would be to check out what DNS is doing. You can use the dig command to see what IP address is being returned for the domains you’re trying to hit.

dig +trace may be useful as well.

I like monit. It’s simple to setup and pretty flexible.

https://mmonit.com/monit/

Not a particularly helpful comment but I struggled with this kinda thing until switching to Node Red. It made complex things much easier to get working.

Man I went to the drive through after work one day, got a few things, and holy shit how is it almost $30?!

Unfortunately these days to get the old prices you have to use their app. Fortunately (at least for me) it works pretty well and it might actually be better value than it used to be.

There’s nothing really bad with PiHole but I moved from it to AdGuard, both on proxmox. The UI brought me in, makes management a bit easier. It also supports DoH right out of the box.

Try em both. See what you think.

Can you use json_attributes instead of the state for the value?

Give this a read for some ideas:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/rest-sensor-state-max-length-is-255-characters/31807/20

I just spent a week evaluating all the popular choices to document an overlay network I’m standing up. All I want is a simple markdown interface to write notes in. My goal was something with a very simple UI, markdown, and very light weight.

MediaWiki, Bookstack, and WikiJS (or JSWiki) were good but they were too much for what I needed. I ended up with stumbling on gollum and really like it. It’s very very simple, fast, and clean. I wrote a one line cronjob and now I’m backed up to gitlab.

https://github.com/gollum/gollum

Ah - check out AdGuard then - it supports DoH right out of the box. That should help hide DNS from your ISP.

Oh yea - there’s nothing wrong with PiHole - it works fine. I ran it for years. I just feel AdGuard is the better choice these days.

I haven’t tried nextdns but I moved from PiHole to AdGuard Home. It can still be locally hosted and the UI is waaaay better and it offers more configuration, including per client settings. I really don’t know why PiHole is still recommended.

Huh…so there’s currently no open source search engine out there? I see a few crawlers, and some UIs the crawlers can use but no one project consolidating the two.

You alluded to this already but ESP32 et al is really awesome but they (and arduino) are microcontrollers, not mini pcs like a raspi which have very different purposes.

You CAN run a webserver on a microcontroller but you’re essentially writing a program to do so. On a raspi you’re installing a full OS and then installing apps (nginx, Apache, jellyfin etc).

Conversely raspi has GPIO which can be used to easily interface with electronics just like the ESP32 but now you’re stuck maintaining a whole os to make your LED blink.

This is an ad….

I don’t know what you’re on about.

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

The best (and simplest) thing I have running is AdGuard Home. It’s a DNS server you run that blocks ads on the entire network.

I also run a wireguard server on my router and clients on my laptops and phone.

With these combined when on the road on cell or Wi-Fi connections all my traffic goes right to my home internet and it’s like I’m home.

I have access to all internal services, devices, and I get no ads in apps and websites (where technically possible). Highly highly recommend. I couldn’t live without it.

I also have home assistant running but that is way more work than just installing a server. It’s almost a hobby in of itself.

Editing - I didn’t mention it but PiHole is an alternative to AdGuard Home. I didn’t mention PiHole to keep things simple but after years of using PiHole I’ve switched to AdGuard Home mostly because of the per client configs, ease of maintenance and UI. As always, check out both and choose what’s best for you.

Why can you not set your own DNS on your devices?

If you mean you can’t set your DNS automatically that would be due to DHCP. You can setup your own DHCP server and set the DNS IP to whatever you want (8.8.8.8 etc).

PiHole should handle all this for you all while blocking ads and being a local DNS resolver.