Orbi RBR50 has been EOL for a couple of years now, so as a “review”, this post will be outdated the moment it is published. But I thought to share some of my experiences, some positives, and some negatives in using and setting up mesh routers for the first time then upgrading to another one.…
This isn’t the solution that will fix all synchronizations on Steam platform. Instead, I decided to keep it as a documentation purpose, as most of the posts and articles I could find on the subject hardly touched on it. If you are seeing “Unable to sync” on the Steam client for all games, you are…
More than a decade ago, I ran the ethernet ‘backbones’ for my home network: ones to connect the nodes, ones to connect workstations, and ones to connect media streaming devices. If I recall correctly, the fastest WiFi standard available at the time to be used to connect nodes-to-nodes, were either slightly slower or faster than…
I’m calling it a band-aid fix, because this is technically not a “fix”. As far as I could find, it is technically not possible to use mDNS (Bonjour) over VPN. Only when the remote client is bridged through VPN mDNS packets can reach the client, but it causes its own havoc, especially less useful for…
As I was upgrading to a new router this week, one of the things I immediately wanted to test was the existing ethernet cables and ports. As reliable as they are, cables and ports are also physical objects with lifespans. If cables running behind the walls are damaged, that’s a major headache; and if one…
Upgrading a router every few years takes more than what it should. The price tag on these machines is generally on par with entry-level smartphones, and smartphones with the average upgrade cycle of 4 years have better upgradability and migration softwares. Not to mention, all the manufacturers are eager to support migration away from the…
WiFi is the basic necessity of 21st century. We fight over it, much like cowboys have fought over lands to grow their, well, cows. Wild West is an unusual metaphor for WiFi, but my reasoning is that home networking markets lack transparency and control on how much these home-grown radio wave generators are sold and…
As much as I would like to recommend simply disabling UPnP and be done with it, there is no complete replacement, from what I can gather, in terms of day-to-day home network environment. It warrants a separate write-up, but long story short, on IPv4 with NAT, there is no theoretical replacement for UPnP yet. With…
This one is for documentation purposes. Networking issue is usually the rabbit hole that gets deeper and weirder more we find out. My method of approaching networking is to leave the ones that are currently working, as-is. In other words, don’t jinx it. The problem I encountered was just plain weird. I was spooked by…
I was thinking of adding a category for ‘app for that’, but after some research I found out Apple had already trademarked the phrase “there’s an app for that”. So no luck there, and this time around this isn’t about the app either. It’s a web utility that is concise and beautifully designed to serve…
Normally a user can test the proxy server with any tools, —mine was Firefox until recently— but there is a time when more bare bone approach is needed —like when my Firefox started acting up. Jokes aside, it’s good to have an appropriate tool to test just the right subject, in which case the proxy…
There is a problem with all IoT or smart home devices: external access. This is a problem that all users at some point have to ask themselves how they would like to approach it. What’s the point of having internet-enabled, sensor-filled, micro smart devices in each room, if none of them will respond soon as…
In my previous post on how to setup VPN VLAN, I discussed the methodology of setting one for the first time. Now that it’s near Black Friday of 2024, some of the VPN providers have already started pre Black Friday sale in October. No doubt consumers are shopping for which service is right for their…
Not all countries run DPI, nor do all websites block people based off of region. I, for one, started building my own geoblock-proof setup since I moved to the new neighborhood about a decade ago. HomeDepot had this neighborhood IPs blocked. I don’t know what my ISP was thinking assigning blacklisted commercial IP to residential…