Use the friend’s network as a VPN/proxy/whatever to obscure my home IP address

And then your friend is responsible for your actions on the internet. The end goal you described is so vague that at least I wouldn’t let your raspberry connect on my network.

There’s a ton of VPN services which give you the end result you want without potential liability or other issues for your friend. If you just want to tinker, this thread has quite a bit of information to get you started.

So, you want the traffic to go other way around. Traffic from the HomeNet should go to the internet via FriendNet, right? In that case, if you want the raspberry box to act as a proxy (or vpn) server, you need to forward relevant ports on the FriendNet to your raspberry pi so that your HomeComputer can connect to the raspberry box.

Or you can set up a VPN and route traffic trough that to the other way. Tunnels work both ways, so it’s possible to set up a route/http proxy/whatever trough the VPN tunnel to the internet, even if the raspberry box is the client from VPN server point of view.

I don’t immediately see the benefit of tunneling your traffic trough the FriendNet to the internet, unless you’re trying to bypass some IP block of something other potentially malicious or at least something being on the gray area. But anyways, you need a method for your proxy client to connect to the proxy server. And in generic consumer space, that needs firewall rules and/or port forwarding (altough both are firewall rules, strictly speaking) so that your proxy server on raspberry box is visible to the internet in the first place.

Once your proxy server is visible to the internet it’s just a matter of writing up few scripts for the server box to send a message to the client end that my public IP is <a.b.c.d> and change proxy client configuration accordingly, but you still need some kind of setup for the HomeNet to receive that, likely a dynds-service and maybe some port forwarding.

Again, I personally would set up something like that with a VPN tunnel from raspberry box to the HomeServer, but as I don’t really undestand what you’re going after with setup like this it’s impossible to suggest anything else.

So, you want a box which you can connect to any network around and then use some other device to connect to your raspberry box which redirects your traffic trough your home connection to the internet?

The easiest (at least for me) would be to create VPN server on your home network. Have a dyndns setup on your home network to reach it in the first place, open/redirect a port for openvpn (or whatever you like) and have a client on raspberry running on it. After that you can connect your other device to the raspberry box (via wifi or ethernet) and create ip-forwarding/NAT rules for your traffic so that everything goes to the raspberry box, then to your home server via VPN tunnel and from there to the internet.

You can use any HTTP proxy with this, or just let the network do it’s thing and tunnel everything via your home connection, but in either case the internet would only see your encrypted VPN traffic to your home network and everything else is originated from your home connection.

You can replace VPN with just HTTP proxy, but both are pretty close the same on the terms of ‘cost’, so your network latency, bandwidth and other stuff doesn’t really change regardless of the approach. But if you just want the HTTP proxy you can forward a port on your home network for the proxy and just use that on your devices without raspberry box and achieve the very same end result without extra hardware.

And obviously, if you go with VPN tunneling for everything, you don’t need raspberry for that either, just a VPN client which connects to your home network and that’s it. The case where you have devices which can’t use VPN directly would benefit from the raspbery box, but if you already can set up a HTTP proxy for the thing you’re actually using, I don’t see the benefit of running a separate hardware for anything.

Some port forwarding or opening ports from firewall is needed on any scenario. But there’s a ton of options to limit access from anyone accessing your stuff. However, this goes way beyond the scope of your question and more details are necessary on what you’re actually trying to achieve with setup like this.

Yes, I get that. They can be very useful, specially if you share a NAS with family or something similar. At work the most common request for backup recovery is a user error, with a huge margin, so I guess you could call a separate copy a backup too, but like you said, it should not be the only copy. I’m personally a bit hesitant to call that a backup at all, but you do you, I’m not going to debate what qualifies.

3-2-1 is obviously the best approach, but (in my opinion) for the majority 2-1-1 (two copies, on a hard drives with one copy offsite) is enough, even if you run a small business, as long as the offisite copy is incremental, so that you can revert to an earlier date and mitigate ransomware as well as a user error which isn’t immediately noticed.

In any case, the only fact I can rely with ~20 years of experience in the business is that hardware breaks. The only question is ‘when’, not ‘if’. And no matter if you’re a home gamer or a system architect for Meta, you need to plan how to mitigate that risk. Running everything on a single location with two separate hardware is better than having only one mainboard and from that you can mix and match whatever you want, limiting factors (mostly) being your time and wallet.

It’s a ‘hot copy’ or just ‘copy’ if you rsync/whatever the files. And they’ll be gone too if the whole system fails due to power supply faulting, thunderstorm hitting the lines, misplaced coffee cup falling over, dropping the whole machine and so on…

everyone on the internet says that RAID is not a backup

Because it is not.

I just want to avoid losing my files when the disk fails.

Backups. Preferably multiple. At least one of them off site.

I would hook up the rsync target drive to the same machine as the rsync host drive

And lose both in case there’s a power supply failure, voltage spike on the grid, water spill or something else. Plenty of options which will fry the whole system.

Never was, never will be.

I really like the project and have been happily running it on my home lab for quite a while. But for enterprise their pricing for enterprise use is not really cheap either. 510€/socket/year is way more than the previous vmware deal we’re running. Apparently broadcom has changed their pricing to per core which is just lunatic (it would practically add up to millions per month on our environment), so it’s interesting to see what’s going to happen when our licenses expire.

I have just the normal 3x25A on main breaker box. So only about 17kW available for my house and garage.

I missed those on quick browse. They seem to tick all the boxes, but I didn’t find any kind of European standards mentioned, no CE-branding or anything, so due to my insurance those might not be an option. I’ll need to dig a bit deeper on the brand.

at least the particular one I got causes a lot of interference to the z-wave network, so I’m a bit hesistant to add any more of those.

Interesting product line, but I didn’t find thermostat from them which would work as an replacement on the existing dumb thermostat. I could of course switch the thermostat to an contactor and control that via whatever, but I still need the thermostat functionality without any additional connectivity than the device itself, so at least based on a quick glance, I didn’t find a product which would fit my needs.

Interesting product, but based on a quick search online it seems like they don’t have reseller on the EU. PWM or any other kind of modulation isn’t really necessary on my use case, as the building itself dictates that the floor sensor should just keep the full power on until the set temperature is reached. It doesn’t hurt either, but as there’s no availability around EU then I just can’t get my hands on one.

And even if I did, it most likely isn’t sold here for a reason, and I’d be pretty hesitant to install that on my house for insurance and other liability reasons.

I think here’s some misunderstanding going on. I want 3 separate thermostats which each control their own circuit, as they are now, not a single thermostat which could in itself control each of the 3 phases. Thermostats are on different rooms (and even floors), so I need different measuring points as well.

But, as the floor heating has very slow impact on actual room temperature, I want (and need) the option that the resistive wire on the floor doesn’t get too hot, but it still has an input from the actual air temperature on the room, so the thermostat can adjust that as needed.

The Z-TRM3 ticks all the boxes on paper, but it’s causing problems on the Z-wave network itself, so I’m not too interested to add any more of those to the system. Also with that there’s option to just turn it off via z-wave and I haven’t found a simple way to re-enable the heating from the thermostat itself, so while it gets the job done it’s not optimal solution.

As you can connect to the internet you can also access your router (or at least a router). And when running ping, even if you had overlapping IP addresses you should still get responses from the network.

So, two things come to mind: Either your laptop is running with a different netmask than other devices which causes problems or you’re connected to something else than the local network you think you are. Changes on DHCP server or misconfigured network settings on the laptop might cause the first issue. The second might be because you’re connected to your phone AP, some guest network on your devices or neighbors wifi by accident (multiple networks with same SSID around or something like that).

Other might be problems with mesh-networking (problem with ARP tables or something) which could cause issues like that. That scenario should get fixed by reconnecting to the network, but I’ve seen bugs in firmware which causes errors like this. Have you tried to restart the mesh-devices?

Is it possible that your laptop has enabled very restrictive firewall rules for whatever reason? Check that.

And then there’s of course the long route. Start by verifying that you actually have IP address you assume you have (address itself, subnet, gateway address). Then verify that you can connect to your router (open management portal, ping, ssh, all the things). Assuming you can, then check the router interface and verify that your laptop is shown there as a dhcp-client/connected device (or whatever term that software uses). Then start to ping other devices on your network and also ping your laptop from those devices and also verify that they have addresses you assume (netmask/gateway included).

And so on, one piece at the time. Check only single thing at one time, so you get full picture on what’s working and what’s not. And from there you can eventually isolate the problem and fix it.

It’ll always ask for the default configuration after hard reset. So, no, you won’t lose it forever.

That’s better, but you still need to have single wire to loop it around, which is not normally accessible. And at least in here the term ‘multimeter’ spesifically means one without a clamp, so you’d need to wire the multimeter in series with the load and that can be very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Also, cheap ones often are not properly insulated nor rated for wall power (regardless of your voltage), so, again, if you don’t know what you are doing DO NOT measure current from a wall outlet with a multimeter.

or multimeter

Unless you really know what you’re doing DO NOT measure current on a wall outlet with a multimeter. Specially not with a cheap one. That can pretty easily break your hardware, burn your house down and kill you, not necessarily in that order.

“Enough battery life” is a bit wide requirement. What you’re running from that?

Most of the ‘big brands’ (eaton, apc…) work just fine with linux/open source, but specially low end consumer models even from big players might not and not all of them have any kind of port for data transfer at all.

Personally I’d say that if you’re looking for something smaller than 1000VA just get a brand new one. Bigger than those might be worth to buy used and just replace batteries, but that varies a lot. I’ve got few dirt cheap units around which apprently fried their charging circuit when the original battery died, so they’re e-waste now and on the other hand I have 1500VA cheap(ish) FSP which is running on 3rd or 4th set of batteries, so there’s not a definitive answer on what to get.

OpenVPN runs just fine with self signed certs. No need to pay for anyone for that. Easy-RSA package even has nice scripts for you to run. Obviously that becomes a chore pretty fast if you need more than a handful of clients, but maintaining those for yourself and your spouse and kids it’s easy enough.

And, assuming you have public IPV4 address on your internet connection, you can use dyndns service and run all of that on a raspberry pi (or almost whatever you happen to choose). OpenVPN with mobile devices is a bit more challenging, but you can run OpenSwan for IPSEC or some other daemon as well, which might work better for your use case.