Strav's blog

At some point, I want to wall mount a tablet to provide access to Home Assistant.  Here is some information on wall mounting tablets.

My cheap smart home system | HomeAssistant Wall Panel
Recommended android tablet device for a wall mounted display?
Fully Kiosk Browser + Home Assistant
This is my magnetic wall mount setup with wireless charging
How I built my Home Assistant touchscreen
5 things to know about wall mounted home automation tablets
VidaMount On-Wall Tablet Mount - Samsung Tab A 7.0
(How To) Amazon Fire HD 8 Tablet Ring Doorbell Display and Dakboard Kiosk
Can I run a Fire HD 10 tablet without a battery in it?

Here is one just about the dashboard for fun

I'm *finally* happy with my HA dashboard!

The easiest way to do this is open up a Cygwin terminal (as an administrator) and type the command:

chere -i -t mintty -s bash

If the icon doesn't show, you can use the following (Windows 10) from within a cygwin window:

regtool -w -s set /HKCU/Software/Classes/Drive/Shell/cygwin64_bash/Icon 'C:\cygwin64\Cygwin-Terminal.ico'
regtool -w -s set /HKCU/Software/Classes/Drive/Background/Shell/cygwin64_bash/Icon 'C:\cygwin64\Cygwin-Terminal.ico'
regtool -w -s set /HKCU/Software/Classes/Directory/Shell/cygwin64_bash/Icon 'C:\cygwin64\Cygwin-Terminal.ico'
regtool -w -s set /HKCU/Software/Classes/Directory/Background/Shell/cygwin64_bash/Icon 'C:\cygwin64\Cygwin-Terminal.ico'

And to remove the icon:

regtool -w unset /HKCU/Software/Classes/Directory/Shell/cygwin64_bash/Icon
regtool -w unset /HKCU/Software/Classes/Directory/Background/Shell/cygwin64_bash/Icon
regtool -w unset /HKCU/Software/Classes/Drive/Shell/cygwin64_bash/Icon
regtool -w unset /HKCU/Software/Classes/Drive/Background/Shell/cygwin64_bash/Icon

If you don't have admin privileges, you can do the following:

Go to your "Send To" folder

C:\Users\<your_user_name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

Create a shortcut "Bash Here" with this target:

C:\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe -i /Cygwin-Terminal.ico C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe -l -c "cd \"$0\" ; exec bash"

Suddenly all my OpenVPN connections stopped working.  Turns out that the signing certificate expired (took some doing to figure this out).  Here are some links dealing with OpenVPN certificates (and certificates in general)

How to change CA certificate validity period
OpenVPN - expired certificates
Dumping SSL certificate information
Extend validity of a OpenVPN certificate
Easy-RSA v3 OpenVPN Howto
Easy-TLS
How to decrypt an OpenVPN EasyRSA Encrypted Private Key
Generate OpenVPN Certificates and Keys

For PEM, use the following:

openssl x509 -text -in cert.pem

For PKCS#12, use this:

openssl pkcs12 -info -in cert.pfx

To dump a CSR (Certificate Signing Request), use this:

openssl req -text -in request.csr

To dump/check a private key:

openssl rsa -text -noout -in key.pem

I added a backup camera to the truck and to do so, I needed to hook into the reverse switch to make it automatically switch to the camera when put in reverse.  Here are a couple links to wiring diagrams that helped out.  

1993 F150XLT 5.8L info on backup wiring
'93 Bronco Firewall Connectors

I've been using pfSense as my firewall/router for several years now.  Overall, I've been very satisfied except for one issue.  I don't believe I ever got failover to work reliably and that is key.  I had written my own software to handle failover years back so it should have been a no brainer to get it to work properly on a dedicated firewall/router package.  For the past couple years, I actually installed an a/b network switch to manually switch between our primary and backup network as needed and utilized a second (backup) server to connect to the AT&T DSL line.  The current state came up in conversation and I decided I should make another attempt at getting it working properly.  During my research process, I stumbled upon OPNsense which is a fork of pfSense and ultimately decided to give it a try.  It turns out that 5+ years of tweaking my router / firewall / DNS / DHCP / etc... adds up to a significant amount of configuration so it took a few days to get everything set up but I finally made the switch and I believe everything (including failover) is working properly now.  Here are a bunch of links that I used to get everything set up (note: some links are for pfSense but are related/applicable).

Note: While apparently it is possible to import some configuration sections from a pfSense export file, I chose to set everything up manually to ensure it was done (theoretically) properly and not take any chances on configuration incompatibility.  In some cases, I did export configs from both systems, extract data from the pfSense backup, clean it up and paste it into the OPNsense config and re-import, but this was mainly for DHCP static address mapping.

Comparison
Thinking about moving from pfSense to OPNsense

Multi-WAN / Failover
How to configure pfSense as multi wan (DUAL WAN) load balance failover router
"Skip rules when gateway is down"-equivalent in OPNSense
(Solved) Multiwan (failover) DNS not working
Default gateway behavior with DNS Resolver in 2.4.4
DNS doesnt work for wAN 2 FAILOVER
DUAL WAN ON PFSENSE 2 - HD Quality
pfSense Part 10: Configure Multi WAN Load Balancing
How to Setup Failover and Load Balancing in PFSense
Pfsense - Multiple Wan link load-balancing
Pfsense - Multiple Wan link Failover Configuration
OPNsense - Multi WAN

Installation
OPNsense Installation [ Step by Step ]

Port Forwarding
NOTE: for port forwarding, set up the port forward and OPNsense will automatically create the linked rule.
Portforwarding in OPNsense
[Tutorial] How I do port forwarding - simple and straightforward
How to Configure Firewall Rules in OPNsense

BIND
OPNsense - BIND Plugin
BIND with DNSBL – more detailed information about DNSBL types?
DNSBL via BIND Plugin

Config Backups
Automatic config backups using os-api-backup
Sample bash script for backups using the API

Miscellaneous
My Successful Migration - pfSense to OPNsense
How to setup AT&T Arris BGW210-700 IP passthrough