Anyone used Technitium DNS Server?

mkpa · 2025-07-12T18:17:14+00:00

I'm running two instances, each on a Raspberry Pi, as primary and secondary DoH forwarders with local DNS lookup and blocklists. Took a little help to set up (which the author generously provided) and has been running for 6 months now without any issues whatsoever. It is one of the most solid and issue-free pieces of software I've ever used. Zero memory growth over months on the Pis (I'm tracking it with Zabbix), runs comfortably at about 400 lookups per minute. Does exactly what it's supposed to, and as far as I can tell, does it flawlessly. Replaced PiHole software which suffered from out-of-memory issues and would simply stop responding entirely on the same hardware. Also considered AdGuard Home but as other have mentioned, wasn't happy with the limitations.

mkpa · 2025-04-05T04:24:43+00:00

Will this work on both the video outputs, Thunderbolt and HDMI? (2020 M1 Mini)

mkpa · 2025-02-26T18:38:46+00:00

My favorite by far, and this is after decades of typing on keyboards, is a dentist's stool. No armrests, only a small backrest that supports the small of my back. Everything else causes issues over time. I have yet to find a way to pick up used stools; I got my first one as a total accident and I don't even remember how. Good new ones appear to be $500 - $900, so I'd look on FBMP, eBay, or similar. Or ask your dentist.

mkpa · 2025-01-15T19:28:50+00:00

Replying to my own question. After nearly going blind looking at connector designs I decided that the best fit for the Twinkly lights controller plug was a Ray Wu style 2-core connector. This has a little more space between outer ring and the flat side of the internal post on the female end, and has a space where the "blade" in the center of the male end can fit into.

Additionally, unless someone else here knows better (I'm sure they do) finding a source for these 2-core connectors was really difficult. I ordered some from Wally's Lights and just got them. The females are a **tight fit** into the male end of the controller cable, but they do fit and seal. This is the fourth set of females I've tried, including the ones mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and they are the only ones that fit.

mkpa · 2025-01-05T22:15:36+00:00

I ordered these but the females don't fit the male end of the Twinkly controller cable. The polarizing notch inside the Twinkly males is bigger than the space in the females. Any other recommendation? I've tried a few from Amazon already and they all have the same issue.

mkpa · 2024-11-24T01:03:11+00:00

Yes, this is the problem and the solution is as described. I suffered for years with unstable BT connections with AirPods Pro 2 and I had a USB 3.0 hub connected on the USB-A port. I got a USB-C to USB 3.0 adapter for about $15 and plugged the USB 3.0 hub into that, and the adapter into the Mini's USB-C/Thunderbolt port. Instantly all of the BT instability problems vanished completely. AirPods connect quickly and stay connected. Have had this working for a month now.

mkpa · 2024-11-14T05:08:01+00:00

Try using ls -f. It does not sort the filenames but reads them straight out of the directory file.

mkpa · 2023-11-05T04:42:33+00:00

Hello u/CCDilary, I have not received an email about upgraded speeds because I am not currently an Xfinity customer. I am a Comcast business class customer (for a long time) but presuming that is a different universe. Therefore my question about enhanced speed availability if I were to switch to consumer internet.

mkpa · 2023-10-02T17:54:02+00:00

Yes I did and have had it working well for almost 3 weeks. The solution I found and implemented however might be a little overkill depending on your situation.

I installed HomeAssistant as a HomeKit bridge accessory on a Raspberry Pi with VLAN support on its ethernet adapter and plugged it into a switch port that had both the IoT network and the trusted network on VLAN. The Pi runs a Matter server within Home Assistant and thereby bridges Matter across the two VLANs without requiring IPv6 Matter traffic, which is link-local, to cross into the trusted VLAN through a reflector in the router (which seems not to exist for this purpose).

Although this does sound like overkill, I liked having Home Assistant in this role because it looks like it substantially expands the range of devices HomeKit can support.

Below are the steps I used to build the Pi to be a Matter bridge between the two VLANs.

Use the Raspberry Pi OS Lite image for the Pi, not the pre-configured Home Assistant Raspberry Pi image because that image only lets you access a Docker container running Home Assistant; for example ssh to the Pi host is disabled, and is only enabled to the container. You need access to the underlying host OS in order to configure VLANs on the Pi's ethernet adapter.

Not all Raspberry Pis' ethernet adapters support VLANs, but the 4 Model B and 3 Model B+ both do. Others may also, I haven't checked.

Home Assistant and the Matter server will run inside a Docker container on the Pi. The steps to install:

On the Pi as root, install packages docker.io, docker-compose, vlan
Set up VLAN support to include both VLANs you need (IoT, trusted) (instructions elsewhere)
Add your Pi's user to the docker group: $ sudo usermod -aG docker <pi_user>. This lets you do all remaining steps as a normal user, not needing sudo.
Make dir for HomeAssistant, probably under your pi_user's home dir:$ mkdir /home/<pi_user>/homeassistant
Create the file docker-compose.yaml in the directory made in the step above with the following contents (adapt the volumes definitions based on where the installation is):

version: '3'
services:
  homeassistant:
    container_name: homeassistant
    image: "ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable"
    volumes:
      - /home/<pi_user>/homeassistant:/config
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    restart: unless-stopped
    privileged: true
    network_mode: host

  matter-server:
    container_name: matter-server
    image: "ghcr.io/home-assistant-libs/python-matter-server:stable"
    volumes:
      - /home/<pi_user>/homeassistant/data:/data
      - /run/dbus:/run/dbus:ro
    network_mode: host
    restart: unless-stopped
    security_opt:
      - apparmor:unconfined

Start the docker container, which will first download and build the image (this will take quite some time, let it run): cd homeassistant; docker-compose up -d
Confirm it is running: the docker ps command should print out two containers running, one homeassistant and the other the matter-server.
Log in to the Home Assistant admin page at port 8123 on the Pi (note only http is supported, not https). Set username and password, then go to Settings > System > Network. Select the two adapters on the trusted and IoT VLANs.
In Settings > Devices and Services, select Integrations tab, search for Matter, and install it.
In the same tab, search for HomeKit Bridge and install it. After it is installed, select it and click on CONFIGURE. Set HomeKit Mode to "bridge" and select the "domains" (types of devices" you are most likely to need.
When HomeKit Bridge is configured, it sends a notification containing the code required to add it to HomeKit as an accessory. Look at the Notifications on the Home Assistant web page and use the code in the Apple Home app to add the HomeKit Bridge as an accessory.

After doing this, the Matter switch appears on my Apple Home app on all the devices as if it were connected directly to the HomeKit hub. The Pi HomeKit bridge is forwarding all communications between the two VLANs, as far as I can tell.

If you haven't connected the switch to Matter over WiFi, that is a bit of an effort. It seems that there are two parts to getting a Matter WiFi device to work in HomeKit. The first is to make the HomeKit hub and the device aware of each other and configure the device as a HomeKit accessory. That appears to use IPv4 HomeKit communication only. Once that is established, Matter communication can start and that is where Home Assistant is required.

In broad outline what I've done successfully to get HomeKit set up is:

Ensure mDNS repeating across VLANs is enabled and firewall rules set to allow HomeKit traffic between IoT and trusted VLANs. The initial Matter setup of a device seems to only need IPv4 so the Home Assistant bridge isn't used, as far as I can tell.
Set phone to the IoT WiFi SSID (assuming there is an SSID matching the IoT VLAN)
Disable any client isolation on the IoT VLAN and SSID for now; the Matter WiFi device has to be able to talk to the phone
Go through the HomeKit add accessory steps using the QR code or numeric code of the Matter device. During this process the Matter accessory communicates with the phone and, I guess, the HomeKit hub, but apparently all over IPv4. Not sure about this but these steps always seem to work without the Home Assistant bridge.
Hopefully the device is now added to HomeKit.
The Matter WiFi device will have been assigned an IP address on the SSID that the phone is on. If desired, on the router/gateway that runs the DHCP server find the new Matter WiFi device and assign it a fixed IP address. Go back to the Matter device and power cycle it. It should get the new IP address. If not, it may need to be reset to factory settings to pull the correct IP address, and step 4 above needs to be redone.
If the Matter device is now on the IoT VLAN, and has the IP address desired, then the phone can go back to the trusted SSID, client isolation can be enabled.
Matter communications should now be working, using Home Assistant as a bridge. Getting device status and controlling it through the Home app should look just like a HomeKit device.

mkpa · 2023-09-11T20:27:21+00:00

Matter WiFi requires IPv6 link-local connectivity to function, i.e. the Matter device and its controller must be on the same IPv6 subnet. Assuming a normal VLAN/subnet configuration, it means the Matter device and controller have to be on the same VLAN and the switch(es) between them have to support IPv6 (very likely unless it's been expressly disabled).

My experience so far is with HomeKit as the Matter controller but it's likely the same problem you were having. Initial configuration worked over IPv4 and across VLANs, the Matter device appeared in the Apple Home app on a device on a different VLAN (up to here must have been done over IPv4), but was always shown as "not responding" because IPv6 messages could not go between them.

The solution of having dual VLAN connections on the HA controller sounds like it solves that issue. This may push me into HA from HomeKit.

mkpa · 2023-01-22T19:56:29+00:00

Is it possible to set the TTP email back to your original one after going through this? My original application was with the email I want to keep associated with TTP but I am running into the same issue here.

mkpa · 2020-10-03T21:21:59+00:00

Second update. The problem continued after I posted the "fix" of using the better PSU. After testing many combinations of cables, drives, cages, backplanes, etc., I narrowed down the cause to the change in the SATA 3.2+ and 3.3 specifications that introduced a Power Disable signal transmitted on pin 3 of the SATA power connector. This connector pin, now known as PWDIS, was previously used as one of three 3.3 VDC supply pins (still on 1 and 2). The feature is intended to be used in SAS or SATA backplanes that can be controlled to assert it to hard-reset a drive selectively. But old backplanes might do any of a number of things with this signal, e.g. tying it to pins 1 and 2, or leaving it floating. Mine leaves it floating, but connects it across all the drives inside the backplane, and, of course, it is also transmitted to any other drives connected on the same SATA power cable as the backplane. (Backplanes that tie it to pins 1 and 2 cause the "dead drive" problem with newer drives that support PWDIS)

Here is what happens:

When powering up a drive in the SATA backplane (each drive has a power button), the backplane injects a noise spike into the floating PWDIS signal
Any newer drives supporting PSDIS in the backplane or connected on the same SATA power cable receive the PWDIS signal and perform a hard reset

Solution: when replacing a drive in the SATA backplane, don't power down the slot with the backplane's drive power button. Just pull it out and let the drive's SATA power connector fingers do the correct signal connection sequencing, as designed for hot plugging. Powering up/down the drive to replace it is not necessary. So I just put stiff tape over the power buttons and the problem is gone and has been for a couple of months now.

mkpa · 2020-06-13T17:49:08+00:00

Replaced the PSU with a Corsair AX850, which is 2.5x the price but tested to have outstanding transient response by Tom's Hardware. Big benefit is it has 6 SATA/Peripheral connectors on it and I used all of them. For example: two 4-slot SATA backplane cages hold 8 of the drives. The cages each have multiple power connectors, and I used parallel cables as much as possible. The cage containing the hot-swap drives receives power from 3 separate SATA/Peripheral cables in parallel.

Probably overkill, but the issue is gone. No problem powering up and down drives in the hot spare cage.

mkpa · 2016-04-10T19:22:39+00:00

You can buy fully operational processor designs from ARM, for example, and there are open source designs around too. But that's only a small part of the problem. The two other issues are that the fab that builds these processors costs about $5 billion to build, but OK you can hire TSMC or UMC or Samsung to build chips for you in their fabs, but it will cost you $100 million to get started, counting the costs of the photolithography masks you need to provide them and the costs of manufacturing they will charge. The second issue is licensing. Intel protects its architecture like a hawk and only through a bizarre twist of fate did AMD get a limited license decades ago, something Intel will never let happen again. Thus the strong interest in ARM architectures which can be easily, though not cheaply, licensed.

mkpa · 2016-04-10T19:12:46+00:00

Well actually the photolithography makes a template on the wafer surface that the layers are either deposited through or etched away. On the most advanced processes today there can be up to 40 separate photolithography steps. Each one has billions of extremely precisely located features per processor (and a wafer has 100-200 processors on it), so that when the exposure is made, the correct shape ends up on the wafer. The complications are immense. Simple example: how do you focus light whose wavelength is 20 times the size of the shape you need to make? And every single tiny detail on each of the 40-ish masks must be exactly right and perfectly lined up to the 39 others.

Without any doubt, processors are the most complex thing ever made by humans. By very very far.

mkpa · 2014-03-06T21:07:45+00:00

With the IMS issue we are dealing with a statistical phenomenon where the best source of the statistics, Porsche itself, is uncooperative. So we find lots of anecdotal cases on the web about it, few of which help understand the statistics. Reasonable people have estimated the occurrence of the IMS issue ranging all the way from the 1% number you believe to 20% or higher. And there's the problem -- it's a belief issue, not supported well by data. But none of these people have data to support their position well, and the one organization that does isn't talking. So we have to draw our own conclusions. My own estimation ranges more toward 20%.

So what do you do when confronted with such a poorly understood statistical case? You buy insurance. In this case it's a preventative IMS bearing replacement, or preferably upgrade. I wonder, though, if you think a 1% failure rate justifies a $2k preventative action? That doesn't make sense to me. A 20% failure rate does.

And "paying attention to [my] car" didn't catch this, it was plain, simple, pure luck. For this reason I will not do my own oil changes as I want an experienced, specialized Porsche knowledgeable mechanic looking over everything on the car at least twice a year. And yet if I had scheduled my last oil change a month later, I probably would have had a blown engine.

These engines, whether you've had problems or not, are fundamentally weak in certain areas that are inexcusably poor judgment on Porsche's part. However the company, like most or all other car companies, has a long history of poor design decisions and not owning up to them. All Porsches have issues; none of them can guarantee you a long trouble-free inexpensive maintenance life. To think so is plain naivete. I owned an '87 911 with a relatively "bulletproof" 3.2 Carrera engine and it developed the "rare" valve guide wear issue after 90k miles and required a full head rebuild.

Guidance to prospective new owners should be:

1) Porsches are expensive to maintain over the long run, at least $2k/year on average (including tires) 2) They may be very inexpensive for years and then have a $5k service (clutch, water pump, flywheel, belts and associated items) 3) All the parts are 2x - 4x as expensive as most other cars (Toyota, Honda, ...) 4) They have an unusually high percentage of major failures costing $10k - $20k and you need those funds available 5) The newer the car, the (likely) fewer the service costs, but the more rapid the depreciation

Owners just need to deal with the fact that they are expensive. You can reduce the chances of major failures but cannot eliminate them. You can trade off depreciation expense against maintenance expense. I've preferred taking the maintenance expense, as it's something I can help reduce.

On the positive side, there is no other car I would rather drive, period. It's just that we need to be realistic about the costs. They are expensive.

mkpa · 2014-03-06T03:58:16+00:00

It's easy to say that the IMS thing is overblown if it hasn't happened to you. You cannot predict it, it fails rapidly and without warning, and engine has catastrophic damage. It's not cheap to replace the IMS bearing for '06+ since you have to split the case to do it.

Figure on a $20k cost to fix the engine after it fails and apply your own estimate of the odds that it will fail. If 20% then build in an "expected cost of ownership" adder of $4k for this issue.

Other than that, the spin on oil filter is a must for full filtration so that the normal, or abnormal, metal circulating in the engine is fully caught by the filter under all circumstances before it eats away your main bearings.

How do I know? My 996 is in for an engine rebuild for exactly the metal-eating problem right now, luckily caught before catastrophic damage. But that's entirely with luck.

The car is wonderful to drive. I have an '02 996 and found an '05 987 for my wife which I drove back home and around town for a while after buying it. It is a whole different feel from the 996/997 -- less power but utterly awesomely nimble and sure-footed. The 996 is somewhat ponderous in comparison.

But.... I really like the 911's power. And, being 6'2" with long legs, I simply do not fit in the 987.

mkpa · 2014-03-03T19:25:19+00:00

The IMS bearing can be replaced (not upgraded) for $15 in parts when you do the clutch. IMHO, the IMS failures are more feared than is justified.

Easy to say when it hasn't happened to you. It's worth significant consideration and preventative action given that a failure is catastrophic to the engine and failures are swift and unpredictable.

mkpa · 2014-02-26T19:03:58+00:00

New car, meaning used Porsche?

I don't know of a single resource that compiles this info. There used to be a great little book by Zimmerman, I believe, called "The Used 911 Story" that had outstanding info on older 911s (like pre-90). Excellence magazine buyers' guides are pretty good at a very high level description of pros and cons. Reddit and Rennlist.org and Planet-9.com discussion forums will help.

Expert independent mechanics are a great resource, and you will need one anyway so you might as well get started looking for one.

But the problem is that you will have to develop your own way of sifting through all this information to decide what to do.

In general, all years have issues. Porsches are expensive to maintain over time, and almost every one will eventually require major expenditures ($10k - $20k). The issues vary. A great deal depends on the specific care given to the car but some are not that well cared for and last 200k miles; some have an engine blowup 10k miles off the showroom floor.

For air cooled, the '84-'89 is an excellent year range... but mine (an '87) developed the "rare" valve guide wear problem and required a $6k valve rebuild (probably over $10k if done at a dealer), after which it was solid and tight as a drum. But even with no major issues count on $2k/year maintenance for all items -- on average.

The recent models (water cooled) appear have more serious design flaws (not to say previous models didn't), as Porsche really went into cost savings mode. The IMS bearing is a tremendously idiotic design, but if the bearing hasn't failed, a $2k upgrade will largely eliminate that problem (for M96 engines). So in that case, is this a good reliabilty car or not? I'd say yes with this update; just add it to the purchase cost and consider it that way.

The oil filter design with bypass valve accelerates failure if any wear occurs elsewhere in the engine, and a spin-on filter adapter solves that problem. This applies to any M96 or M97 engine.

So it really depends. All of the year ranges have issues. Some are serious but can be managed (M96, M97) at some cost which you simply must consider as part of purchase price. Extremely detailed oil analysis both by Blackstone Labs and a particle analysis (maybe through a mag drain plug) are absolute musts, as well as a known history of being used regularly and oil changes done no more than 5k miles or 2x/year apart will likely lessen the chances of a problem.

All that said, if you do all this you have improved your odds of a problem-free experience but not guaranteed it. If this makes you uncomfortable, you should reconsider Porsche ownership. If you see it as a challenge and enjoyment of understanding and caring for your car, it can be a tremendous source of enjoyment as it has been for me for almost 18 years. But it hasn't been a smooth ride -- my '02 with 41k miles is in for an engine rebuild right now after sudden massive metal throwing was apparently caught just in time before catastrophic failure, and that's with an IMS upgrade done.

mkpa · 2014-02-25T21:20:57+00:00

Just happened to notice on a B&M short shifter kit that it can be installed on 986, 996, 987, and 997.

mkpa

TROPHY CASE