As you may have noticed, I’ve been struggling to keep my blog up from time to time. I want to explain why that is and what I do to prevent it. First of all, I am hosting this at my home. Which means whenever my home network goes down, my blog is down too. Usually this is not a problem at all because I dont tinker with the network that much. But recently I switched a few devices around and swapped basically my whole network gear. As you might know I live in a quite old house and I want to make it as smart as I am able to. Therefore I realized that I need to seperate my network quite a bit more than it already was.

Before I had 2 networks which were able to talk with eachother but only one was able to connect to the internet. Now I have 3 networks and still only one is able to connect to the internet. This is on purpose, so I can use on machine on the internet accessible network as a firewall/gateway and dont have to worry about the other networks being exposed.

This makes it a lot easier to keep my blog up and running. As even the machine I use to host the blog is seperated from the other services. If I have the time I will draw up a network diagram of everything, but this wont be accurate right now as I am still working on it and adding more services and devices.

Currently I am working on my own Voice activated Home Assistant, which many people have done before me and there are a lot of “spin up and run” solutions out there. But none of them really seem to the right choice for me. I will talk about it more in detail when its ready for a test deployment, but for now there is still a lot of soft3ware to write and a lot of hardware to be build which I plan to deploy around the house.

But back to the topic of this entry. With the sepeartiojn of concerns in my network I’m hopefully able to keep my blog up without too much hassle, even if some parts of my network goes down. We will see how this works out in the next few days when I will do a desaster/recovery test of my whole system. I will also let you know how it went.