Month: April 2019

I was really excited (sad… I know) to get my Raspberry Pi PoE Hat in the post. My intention here was to de-clutter power cables and make my home automation setup more “wife friendly.”

Fitting the thing was surprisingly easy – ensure you attach the standoffs prior to fitting, you risk damaging the PoE hat each time you remove it. Once fitted I connected the network cable into my PoE switch and everything worked as expected – you’d expect it to be simple to be fair! Then came the noise!

If you’re looking to run this anywhere that noise could be an issue, don’t bother buying the PoE Hat. Even in the cool / early UK Spring I found the fan to run regularly and for extended periods. It’s a small fan so when it gets going it is noisy! Definitely not wife friendly… even less so than the cables!

I’d be interested to hear if your experiences are different!

Updated June 2020 to allow NTP via iptables when VPN not established.

I recently setup a new SSID to enable quick and easy access to a VPN protected network when I needed it, also making this easily accessible for family members who are not computer-savvy.

I used a Raspberry Pi 3 for the task, as a router on a stick. This guide shares the configuration/ commands used to set this up so that:

• All traffic sent to the Raspberry Pi (from devices using it as their default gateway) will be routed via the VPN
• DNS requests sent to the Raspberry Pi (again, where clients are set to use it as DNS server) will be routed via the VPN
• When the VPN disconnects all traffic, including DNS is dropped until such time as the VPN reconnects