I like LibreOffice Draw for this.
And if you did, and want a fun tech project to track what species are in your yard, check out BirdNET Pi: https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi
It can help to download your local map for offline use. The default basemap doesn’t have details like house numbers, but the downloaded maps should.
OsmAnd will do that. If you edit the destinations you can manually specify their order. Click sort there and choose door-to-door to get the most efficient routing.
The app takes some getting used to, but it works very well, and can act as a front-end for contributing to OpenStreetsMap.
I use LibreNMS, which is a fork of Observium. It is primarily SNMP polling, so if you haven’t worked with SNMP before there can be a bit of a learning curve to get it set up. Once you get the basics working it’s pretty easy to add service monitoring, syslog collection, alerting and more. And since it’s SNMP you can monitor network hardware pretty easily as well as servers.
The dashboards aren’t as beautiful as some other options but there is lot to work with.
Interesting. In NC here. Not sure if there’s a difference regionally. I was seeing that kind of RTT on ipv4, but ipv6 was slower. I’ll need to give it another try. The last time I did was at my last place where I had the BGW210. I have the BGW320 now and haven’t tried on that. Maybe that, or changes in their routing since then will make a difference.
AT&T is the same. And the last time I looked they don’t give you enough address space to host your own subnet. You get a /64 instead of a /56. And it’s slower than ipv4.
Every few months I try it out, complain and then switch it off.
Legrand makes a recessed keystone wall plate that may help. There are also other recessed and angled plate options that may help.
Monit works for me. Good basic monitoring solution that can also restart a service/interface.
I also use LibreNMS to do alerting for a variety of conditions (syslog events, sensor conditions, outages and services via nagios). But this is more work to get set up.
I tried draw.io, but ended up liking LibreOffice Draw better for hand-drawing.
If you want to get a live map of the connections on your network you may want to check out netdisco.org or librenms.org. Both are open source network management tools that have mapping.
No problems here with AT&T fiber. Yes, you do need their box (the bypass isn’t even possible yet on their new model that they seem to be installing everywhere now). But the IP passthrough works well enough for me so that my router gets the public IP and I can connect to it using any service I’ve tried to host. I make the best of it by using their wifi (which on the BGW320 is pretty decent) for untrusted devices & iot stuff.
Oh, and I use DDNS, but I have never had the public IP change on me.
Keep the tv dumb. Don’t connect it to the internet.
I like to check rtings.com for model specs and comparisons. Like, some panel types work well in a bright room, some work better than others when you are watching with a bright light source behind you. The warehouse clubs (Costco, BJ’s, Sam’s) tend to have good deals on midrange tvs.
Then pair it with a streaming stick of your choice. A generic Android TV stick/box would work.
With what @infinitevalence recommended I think the M700 is a good inexpensive option if you don’t mind doing some work on the case to hack in another ethernet port. Something like this would even get you 2.5Gbe: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804495748525.html
It’s Realtek, but there appear to be OpenBSD drivers. That exact one will not work with the headers hanging off the back of the card (that end of the card is right behind the power button in the front corner of the PC). But if they were desoldered and replaced with vertical headers it would work perfectly. There might be something similar with different connectors, or a 1Gbe Intel card available.
I have a spare M700 that I just opened up to take some measurements. There is ~4mm space above most of the m.2 wifi card with the drive caddy installed, or ~18mm with the caddy removed. Even with the caddy installed there is that ~18mm open space above the back 5-6mm of the card, so a vertical connector there would work , but would conflict with the install/removal of the drive caddy since it slides toward the front of the case to remove. further modification would be needed to use them together.
At the back there is ~50mm side-to-side space between the fan exhaust and ethernet port. Only 32mm if you only take up the space of the accessory video port. In that width you have ~15mm vertical space (above the row of ports at the bottom), and ~32mm depth (from the inside of the case back to the back of the SATA connector for the 2.5" drive). You would basically just need to enlarge the optional extra video/serial port opening.
You could even fit a multi-port interface at the back, up to 50mm wide. But you wouldn’t be able to use the case screw any more since it’s in that space. And you would need to cut the tab it screws into off the case’s top cover. But the case should still close ok because of the way it slides into place.
Now I’m thinking about ordering that adapter for my own machine to hack in a 2.5Gbe port.
The m.2 A+E card/adapter replacing the wifi card is new to me. Very cool.
Monit for simple stuff and daemon restart on failure. LibreNMS for SNMP polling, graphing, logging, & alerting.
The PC Engines APU2 boards are really great for this in terms of routing performance per watt, but the prices are up. If you can find a used one it might be possible. I use one for routing and a Lenovo ThinkCentre M700 tiny as a server. The M700 is around double the power consumption at idle, but they are both pretty low power. On 120v the APU2 is ~5w, and the M700 is ~10w when idle.
There are a couple of Celeron N2830 fanless mini-pc router options on aliexpress for under €100. It’s 2 core vs the APU2 4 core CPU, but it’s faster per-core, so it should do basic gigabit routing without too much trouble (the APU can do it with OPN/pfSense, but only with some tuning).
And that’s where I think you may have some trouble. I expect OpenBSD will be slower on the network than those FreeBSD-based distributions. And they max out at gigabit on the APU2 platform. But you could always decide later to switch the OS if you need gigabit performance.
Went through a lot of playback apps over the years, and Plexamp is definitely the best of them all. Reliable downloads, good quality, eq settings.
Home Assistant might be worth a look. It’s good for home automation and monitoring tasks.
For flexibility and size I like external m.2 enclosures. I have some from Sabrent, Orico and Rosewill. Of them all the Rosewill is the smallest, has the nicest build quality, and seems to dissipate heat the best.
So I would recommend a Rosewill 9SIA072GJ92919, and add an NVMe SSD of your choice.
I think your MacBook is Thunderbolt 2, so you won’t get full speed but it should still be plenty fast. And this enclosure will give you TB3 speeds if you upgrade your PC later.