I’ve had Philips Hue Smart lights and various switches for nearly a decade now. I like them, they work reliably and allow me to perform some various lightweight automations that I find convenient. They’re quite pricey, the bridge only supports a limited number of devices, however their stability and performance have been good enough that I get no complaints from other occupants of the house.
My kitchen and dining room have spot lights — more than 30 of them, and trying to install Philips Hue GU10 spot lights in all them is far too costly — and would also exceed the capacity of the one Hue bridge I have, so I started off a small project of research, limiting myself to a £100 budget to find out what the way forward was with smart lighting that didn’t have the limitations of the Philips Hue, but that would provide me with the same level of reliability. I already have a Nest Hub (2nd Gen), and have been reading articles about Matter, which is supposed to be the industry standard that hopefully eliminates vendor lock-in and enables local control of smart devices. I know the Nest Hub itself is a Google device, and nobody knows how much longer Google will continue to support this, but since I have limited time to invest in this endeavour, I have convinced myself that if and when the time comes to move on from the Google Home, I would invest the necessary resources to adopt Home Assistant, ergo, I am not heading towards an unrecoverable dead-end.
Just for reference, since the stability might vary depending on the kind of wifi network you have, my home network is a Wifi 5/6 “hybrid mesh” system, with the 2.4Ghz band separated from the 5Ghz band. I called it “hybrid mesh” because it is a hodgepodge of various units acquired over time. Three out of 4 access points are Linksys Velop, Meshed, with support for 802.11r Fast-roaming enabled. Two of those Linksys were bought as a pack, two of them are hardwired, and one of them is using wireless backhaul. The fourth access point is a Fritzbox 7530AX that was issued by one of my ISPs in the past. Two out of 4 of the access points are Wifi 6 capable.
I tried the Wiz GU10 Smart LED Bulbs, two of them. They were on sale at the time, and cost me around £7 each. These paired fine with my Nest Hub over Matter.
At £7 a bulb, these were cheaper than Philips Hue, and as I understand, made by the same parent company as Hue, but still quite expensive considering the number of bulbs to handle. I also had concerns about my consumer-grade wifi’s performance with so many 2.4Ghz devices.
It would be far better instead if there were a wall switch that could control all the lightbulbs independently… and so I searched and found out many products claiming such support, and decided to try out the Sonoff M5-2C-86W, which is the UK spec version with two switches and 86mm width (to fit standard UK back boxes). This is quite a deep switch, and won’t sit comfortably in most UK back boxes, so I had to order some light switch surrounds that gave me about 4 extra millimetres of thickness to allow these switches to fit well and have a decent finish.
Even though the light switch is advertised as being directly compatible with Matter, they encourage you to use their App, which kind of defeats the point of Matter, so I initially deployed without bothering to use their app. However, I encountered several stability issues with wifi: The switches would periodically become unresponsive, and you would have to reset and re-add them to the Nest Hub again as new devices — about once a week.
This was a deal breaker for me, and I was close enough to removing them and filing the project off as a failure to be retried in a year or two when the ecosystem had matured a bit more, but I decided to pair with the manufacturer’s recommended app and check if there were any firmware updates. It turned out there was a small revision which fixed some unspecified bugs (their release notes are not helpful), but the net result was that the switch has remained stable and responsive as a Matter device in the Nest Hub for nearly 2 months now since I performed the firmware updates.
Verdict
In summary:
Build quality and tactile feedback can be improved: it is not as good as the products from the Philips Hue, or the Schneider Electric dumb switch it replaced, but it functional, and we are able to put up with it for the smart functionality. I expect they will come up with better revisions in the future, or some competitors will outdo them.
Stability and reliability is great after upgrading to firmware 1.1.0: out of the box, it was unreliable, and it doesn’t support Firmware Updates via Matter/Nest Hub. If you bought one or more that shipped with older firmware, you have to setup an account on their eWeLink app and update each manually, before you link them to your Matter controller of choice.
After firmware upgrades, I would recommend this switch to someone who was looking for a matter light switch.
Make sure you buy the one with the right specs for your home, because they have a lot of different specs for the same named switch, and I suspect this is the root cause for why Amazon has flagged the product as having a lot of returns.
It has worked well for me, and I find myself hoping they or someone releases the same switch, but with dimmers instead of simple on-off toggles. That’s the next thing I would like to add to my smart home — assuming the Matter Protocol even supports such a thing.
After nearly — or merely — 7 years, my Sharp 900W Standard Microwave R360SLM had deteriorated too much due to rust around the base plate, and I wanted to replace it. I had got used to the quirks of the Sharp mentioned above — it had become easier through experience to hit the buttons on first try and I developed muscle memory for how to set time — mainly, I almost always used the quick start button which adds time in 30 second increments. The machine still worked, but I didn’t like the sight of rust.
The requirements for the replacement Microwave were simple: – It must have a flatbed design – It must be around the same size and capacity as the outgoing one.
In brief, after a long period of research and review reading, I settled on the CASO MCG 25 Ceramic Chef Microwave from a Company that I had never heard about before now.
Why? The marketing for the microwave sounded like the company put some thought into the design of the machine — Stainless steel interior, flatbed design, several auto-cook programmes, and a reasonable price. The fact that it also had a grill and convection function were not essential for me, since I have a built-in oven in my kitchen, so this did not factor in my purchase decision. However, I have been using the grill function too since it is convenient and easy enough to use for small meals.
Overall, the Caso Design appears to be a positive improvement over the outgoing Sharp, and I am glad that it retains a flatbed design, which is something that is becoming rarer to find. I would have no trouble recommending this machine — but you have to discount from the weight of my recommendation the fact that I don’t have a lot of experience with many different machines other than the ones I’ve encountered at my friends’ homes, the occasional holiday home and the ones I’ve owned myself.
Verdict (Positives)
The machine has a stainless steel interior and a glass (or possibly ceramic) base, with a rubber seal around it. Stainless steel is a wise choice as it should be more rust resistant.
The machine defaults to Microwave function, which is its primary purpose, so you can microwave without fuss.
It has physical buttons and a rotary dial which is a great combination in my experience.
Quick start (30 seconds) is one button press — You push the button and after a short delay, the microwave runs for 30 seconds — this is very useful for example, for quickly reheating a cup of tea or coffee. Push the button many times in quick succession to add more time in one minute increments.
The rotary dial adds time in 10-second increments, and since there are many ticks in a single revolution of the dial, you can very easily add many minutes using this dial. Excellent for those longer runs, like grilling or using the convection feature.
From my usage so far, it heats things evenly, and there’s an extractor fan which occasionally continues to run after a programme has ended, presumably to expel moisture or heat.
Micro + Grill is an excellent way to cook things like sausages.
Negatives
Once a programme has started, it is impossible to increase the time. This appears to be a common theme with all microwave ovens I have encountered though.
The extractor fan is pretty weak. It doesn’t expel a lot of moisture, so I default to leaving the machine open for a few minutes after using it, or giving it a quick wipe down with a kitchen towel.
This blog post was painstakingly composed using the Desktop Mode of the Google Pixel 8 with a 24-inch monitor, a keyboard, a mouse and an i-Tec USB C dock.
The feature just about works, but there is some way to go yet before you can forgo buying a laptop.
I needed to enable the following settings in the Developer Options as well: – Enable freeform windows on secondary display – Enable freeform windows – Enable non-resizable in Multi-Window
One of those settings required a restart of the phone, and I’m not certain that they are all required, however, I there is a limit to how much time and effort I’m willing to invest into this trivial detail.
One of the immediate bugs I faced was that while the keyboard and mouse were detected on initial connection, the mouse was constrained to the mobile phone screen only, leaving me with no way of interacting with the external display. It wasn’t until I went into the phone settings, found “External Display”, and toggled the rotation to 90 Degrees and back to Standard that the mouse appeared on the external display.
From this point forward, I was able to launch apps. I straightaway launched Firefox and began composing this post. There is a persistent keyboard bar that shows up, possibly related to auto suggestions and language settings that I could not disable, even though I had an external keyboard. I was however able to tuck it away into a corner of the screen.
Once I maximized an app, I could not figure out how to return it to a floating window size, nor how to bring back the menu to search for and launch a new app.
The external monitor display settings don’t appear to be independent. As far as I can tell, the display scaling is exactly the same as my phone display… My phone is set to a zoom level higher than 100% because I don’t like to squint to read text… this makes sense on my ~6 inch display, but is a bit absurd on an external monitor. I could not find a way to have the external display use a more reasonable zoom level.
I might make some time to send direct feedback to Google about this, and hopefully, they listen and are continuing to improve this feature for upcoming versions of Android.
PS. Hopefully, this is not too badly formatted. While it was possible to compose this on the phone with a keyboard and mouse, it was a bit constrained due to the limited multitasking abilities. I also couldn’t figure out how to resize an image for insertion into this post, for example, probably due to this being something I don’t regularly do on a phone.
Kingston DataTraveler Kyson, marketed as a high-performance USB flash drive with read speeds of up to 200MB/s and write speeds of 60MB/s. I have a 128GB unit purchased directly from Kingston.
Here are some notes about real life performance of the Kingston DataTraveler Kyson USB Flash Drive that might be of help in informing your purchase decision.
The specs of my windows PC aren’t important. It’s a 2020-era AMD AM4 machine and has no trouble reading or writing at speeds far in excess of what this flash drive tops out at. Flash drive is also connected to a USB 3.0 port, so there are no fundamental bottlenecks here.
While copying a 40GB file to this drive, the write speed at which file transfer spent the most time at was just shy of 30MB/s.
The read speed tracked slightly higher than rated at 220MB/s for the same file being copied from USB to internal SSD.
An attempt to run CrystalDiskMark 8 on the flash drive using a 32GB file spent over 10 minutes “preparing…”, and so I cancelled it, as I did not think it would add any further value to the above information.
I’ve been living with three Chromecast with Google TV devices for over a year now. Here are some of the challenges that Chromecasts have that you may not find just by reading reviews.
It is sluggish
The device is sluggish and unpredictable in day to day usage. Sometimes it responds fast, and other times it freezes, just enough to cause you to double or triple-press a button and wind up where you did not expect to while navigating the UI. To deal with this a bit better, I resorted in setting my profile into App-only mode. It’s possible that the newer device that Google sells, the Google TV Streamer is better, but I have not yet had a chance to live with one to compare.
Bluetooth Audio is Unreliable
I have a pair of mid-range Sony headphones, sometimes it’s helpful to others in the home to use headphones while watching TV. This is something that is impossible with all my three devices. The audio frequently drops out or becomes choppy and ruins the pacing of the content you’re watching. It’s effectively impossible to use my bluetooth headphones with this streamer. It’s an interesting issue, because my headphones work just fine with everything else I have tested them with, including 2 different Google Pixel phones, an ipad, a PC and a Macbook.
You have to power-cycle often
There’s something fundamentally wrong with the devices that causes them to crash or fail to display anything when waking up from sleep. It can happen often and intermittently, but not necessarily predictably. You are forced to power-cycle the device whenever this happens. There is a decent workaround for this particular issue though.
It is not a Law-Abiding Citizen over HDMI
Several things wrong with this device’s HDMI behaviour, including the failure to properly initialize on wake-up that I already covered. The other issue is that it regularly steals focus, and forces your TV to switch inputs to the Chromecast even if you did not request or want this.
The dongle will steal HDMI focus whenever it powers up or detects that you have turned on your TV. This is bad, because you can turn on your TV for many reasons that have nothing to do with the Google device, yet it forces your TV to switch input to the one that the dongle is connected to. One common annoyance for me, is that I power on my gaming console, and the chromecast immediately steals the focus just as the PIN input screen appears on the console. I’m forced to input the pin blindly, or to look for a remote to switch the input back to the desired input. There is no way to stop the chromecast from doing this.
The other way that this is a problem is that I have a large “network” of HDMI devices, including an AV-Receiver. The chromecast does not respect the power off command, *unless* the power off command was initiated by the chromecast remote. If you turn it off any other way, it powers right back up and steals HDMI focus, and this prevents even power-saving modes from working as intended.
The device manufacturer appears to be either unaware of any of these issues, or unwilling to even acknowledge and address them.
Profile Management Needs Improvement
You can create multiple user profiles and switch between them. Crucially, you can create profiles for kids and limit apps, but you can’t link profiles within apps to Google TV OS profiles. So for example, you could have a child account on Netflix, but you cannot restrict your Child’s Google TV OS profile to their child account. Every app has its own mechanism for managing profiles and setting parental controls. It’s a giant mess and nobody bothers to use them.
Yes, I understand why this is so, and it’s not an acceptable excuse. Google controls the OS and has rules in place for what apps it allows on the store. They could start to fix this at any time they want by desinging a unified mechanism for the OS, and putting the right policies in place for apps that are accepted on the platform.
Switching profiles requires a lot of steps, on a device which is already not very responsive.
Power-cycling the device can allow a child to bypass profile lock, even if you have set up all the content restrictions necessary. Kids can sign out of youtube, and by so doing, evade any content restrictions that you have put into their curated Google Profile that you built, and crucially, removing the ability for you to get a report of what they’re watching so you can review and discuss with them if needed. Youtube is a bit unique in that you can watch it without an account or a subscription, and if you’ve tried to watch youtube without an account, you might get a picture of the kind of crap that it throws at you. This puts you in a tough spot — your kid wants to watch minecraft and other gaming videos, they’ve outgrown youtube kids, you want them to be able to watch said minecraft videos and you’ve had discussions with them about responsible use of Youtube, but you cannot put in place any guardrails. Pfft!
A lot of hot air gets thrown about regarding parental controls and how it’s not the role of the government etc etc… it’s not too much to ask for tech platforms to provide tools that work for setting limits and being able to review activity on an account.
I’ve been on an adventure, trying to catalogue and measure the bandwidth usage of the devices on my network by using IPFIX from a Mikrotik router and a collector based on nfacctd. I’m making good progress on the the project. More updates to come soon, as I’m now working on the UI bits for viewing the stats.
During this process, I have found out that my Nest Doorbell Camera is generating a new IPv6 address for itself at an alarming rate — more than 50 distinct IP addresses I’ve counted in a single day by matching to the MAC address of the device. This corresponds to around 102MB of total upload and download bandwidth used — an insane number of new IP addresses for something that isn’t very chatty.
Some research leads me to believe that the device is taking the idea of privacy a little too seriously by aggressively implementing RFC 4941. This is quite bizzare — the doorbell camera only connects to properly secured and locked-down endpoints that Google operates, and the home user’s apps connect to some other secure relay service in order to view the camera’s feed, so whose privacy are they trying to protect, and from whom?
Dear Google, please stop polluting network logs by generating a new IPv6 address too frequently, and more importantly, give users an option to disable this feature. Even RFC 4941 acknowledges that an entity that wishes to track an IPv6 user by IP address can simply track the prefix of the network, which provides the same level of granularity that can be had through IPv6.
My homebrew router got fried by Lightning a couple of years ago during a thunderstorm, and facing budget constraints and limited time, I did not replace it with another homebrew router. I decided to get a Mikrotik router because I was curious about Mikrotik, and the price for the hardware + RouterOS license seemed cheaper than what it would cost to buy a new mini PC to build another homebrew router.
This is all well and good, and has been running my home network just fine, but it lacks a bandwidth monitor for my home network. I have decided to try to solve this problem with a bit of a DIY solution, and this is the first blog post documenting the first step of what will eventually become a complete bandwidth usage counter for my home network.
Requirements
A machine to host/run the netflow or ipfix receiver. I happen to have a Raspberry Pi 5 with a high-endurance MicroSD card, and I think it will do the job just fine, and none of this data is critical.
Software to receive the IPFIX data from your mikrotik router. PMAcct has an excellent netflow collector, and it is free and open source software with which I have some very basic experience.
Mysql or Maria DB for storing the data and querying it for reporting.
Consult your search engine or AI assistant of choice for help with deploying and configuring a mysql instance if required.
My first step is simply to have the traffic data collected somewhere, I will worry about visualization in a future blog post.
Note that I use pmacctd/nfacctd a bit interchangeably sometimes. pmacctd is the daemon that handles traffic via pcap while nfacctd handles netflow. The project is named pmacctd.
The Recipe
Assuming you have a fully functional raspberry pi that is up to date and accessible on your network at 192.168.1.35.
Install Pmacct
apt install pmacct
Configuration for Pmacct/nfacctd
Because we’re configuring a netflow receiver, we’re working with nfacctd here which is part of the pmacct collection. We will update the default file shipped in /etc/pmacct/nfacctd.conf . It is wise to stay with default files so that we can easily leverage the built-in systemd unit files later on.
! nfacctd configuration!!!daemonize:truedebug:falsepidfile:/var/run/nfacctd.pidsyslog: daemon!! interested inin and outbound trafficaggregate[in]: src_host, dst_host, proto, tag, src_mac, dst_mac,vlan, src_port, dst_port, post_nat_dst_host, post_nat_dst_port, post_nat_src_host, post_nat_src_port! replace zzz.zzz.zzz.zzz with your public IPv4 address. ! and do the same for your ipv6 address if you have one, or remove the condition.aggregate_filter[in]: dst host zzz.zzz.zzz.zzz or dst net 2a02:xxxx:xxxx::/48aggregate[out]: src_host, dst_host, proto, tag, src_mac, dst_mac,vlan, src_port, dst_port, post_nat_dst_host, post_nat_dst_port, post_nat_src_host, post_nat_src_portaggregate_filter[out]: src net 192.168.1.0/24 or src net 2a02:xxxx:xxxx::/48sql_user: routersql_passwd: routersql_db: routersql_host: localhostplugins: mysql[in], mysql[out]sql_optimize_clauses:truenfacctd_port:2055sql_refresh_time:120sql_history: 10msql_history_roundoff: mhsql_table_version:2sql_table[in]: inbound_%m%Ysql_table[out]: outbound_%m%Ysql_table_schema[in]: /etc/pmacct/inbound.sqlsql_table_schema[out]: /etc/pmacct/outbound.sql
Partial explanation of the nfacctd.conf
We’re setting nfacctd to run as a daemon without debug, and to write log output to syslog. Note, on many modern linux systems with systemd, the log file is binary, and you have to use journalctl -f to see and follow the syslog output in realtime.
We have configured nfacctd to use a user called router with the same password to connect to a database of the same name, only on localhost. Please ensure that this meets your security requirements. For my use case, the raspberry pi is accessible only on my LAN, and the user account I have created only has privileges granted on the router database, so this configuration is secure enough for my home network. These options are defined with the “sql_” lines.
The sql_table_ lines allowed me to configure nfacctd so that it creates one table for inbound traffic stats, and another table for outbound traffic stats. The tables are named by month and year, for example, the table containing inbound traffic stats for June 2024 would be named: inbound_062024, and one for outbound would be outbound_062024. I have configured it this way to keep a limit on how large the tables could grow, and make it easier to delete old tables once the stats have been processed for reporting purposes.
The traffic of interest is identified with the aggregate_filter[in] and aggregate_filter[out] configurations on line 15 and 16. It uses a syntax similar to tcpdump (but I have found that it doesn’t accept all filters that tcpdump would accept. My network supports both IPv6 and IPv4, so my filters for outbound traffic match for LAN traffic originating from my network.
The aggregate_filter[in] configuration is configured this way because even though IPFIX contains the post-NAT information, I could not find a way to have nfacctd filter on that field. The workaround is to simply match all traffic inbound to the public IPv4 address of the router, and capture the post-nat IP and port details to the inbound table where post-processing later on can handle it correctly. We also capture the mac address of the client on the outbound side, because this info is available, and allows us to match ipv4 addresses to their ipv6 address when they share the same mac address.
The debug flag can be flipped to true if things aren’t quite working right, and you need to test things out.
We are using the sql_table_version 2 because it provides the primitives that are sufficient for our purpose. The aggregation command you provide needs to match include all the fields that are required for the table schema.
Please refer to the configuration reference for further details about the configuration file
Additional Files
You need to provide an SQL template for the outbound table and the inbound table that we have specified above as our preference.
File content for /etc/pmacct/inbound.sql
# ***********************************************# place this content in/etc/pmacct/inbound.sql## ***********************************************# this is the file pointed toby the *sql_table_schema[in] configurationin# line35 of the nfacctd.conf file#remove the commentscreatetableinbound_%m%Y ( agent_id INT(4) UNSIGNED, mac_src CHAR(17) NOT NULL, mac_dst CHAR(17) NOT NULL, vlan INT(2) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, ip_src CHAR(50) NOT NULL, ip_dst CHAR(50) NOT NULL, src_port INT(2) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, dst_port INT(2) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, ip_proto CHAR(20) NOT NULL, post_nat_ip_dst VARCHAR(50) DEFAULTNULL, post_nat_port_src INT(2) DEFAULTNULL, post_nat_ip_src VARCHAR(50) DEFAULTNULL, post_nat_port_dst INT(2) DEFAULTNULL, packets INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL, bytes BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL, stamp_inserted DATETIMENOT NULL, stamp_updated DATETIME,PRIMARY KEY (agent_id, mac_src, mac_dst, vlan, ip_src, ip_dst, src_port, dst_port, ip_proto, post_nat_ip_dst, post_nat_ip_src, post_nat_port_dst, post_nat_port_src, stamp_inserted));# observe that the tablename has %m%Y which matches the naming format for our tables.
File content for /etc/pmacct/outbound.sql
# ************************************************# place this content in/etc/pmacct/outbound.sql## ************************************************createtableoutbound_%m%Y ( agent_id INT(4) UNSIGNED, mac_src CHAR(17) NOT NULL, mac_dst CHAR(17) NOT NULL, vlan INT(2) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, ip_src CHAR(50) NOT NULL, ip_dst CHAR(50) NOT NULL, src_port INT(50) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, dst_port INT(2) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, ip_proto CHAR(20) NOT NULL, packets INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL, post_nat_ip_dst VARCHAR(50) DEFAULTNULL, post_nat_port_src INT(2) DEFAULTNULL, post_nat_ip_src VARCHAR(50) DEFAULTNULL, post_nat_port_dst INT(2) DEFAULTNULL, bytes BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL, stamp_inserted DATETIMENOT NULL, stamp_updated DATETIME,PRIMARY KEY (agent_id, mac_src, mac_dst, vlan, ip_src, ip_dst, src_port, dst_port, ip_proto, post_nat_ip_dst, post_nat_ip_src, post_nat_port_dst, post_nat_port_src, stamp_inserted));
Create another table manually by executing this SQL on your database where we will eventually have pre-processed data to help speed up reporting. The two tables above will only hold relatively raw data which would need further processing depending on the kind of reporting you need to perform.
-- Table structure for main statistics cache/summary.CREATETABLE `main_summary` (`id`bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,`ip`varchar(50) NOT NULLDEFAULT'0',`mac`CHAR(17) DEFAULTNULL,`duration_type`varchar(10) NOT NULLDEFAULT'0',`duration`varchar(12) NOT NULLDEFAULT'0',`bytes_in`bigint(20) unsigned DEFAULT'0',`bytes_out`bigint(20) unsigned DEFAULT'0',`stamp_inserted`datetimeNOT NULL,PRIMARY KEY (`id`),UNIQUEKEY`ip_duration_type_duration` (`ip`,`duration_type`,`duration`),INDEX (duration),INDEX (ip)) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COMMENT='duration type specifies whether this is a state for day, month or year. \r\n\r\nthe duration field specifies which unit of the duration the stat covers. Example, for a duration_type = day, then the duration field will contain "2018-10-15" meaning the stats are for the 15th of October 2018. For duration_type = month, you should expect "102018" meaning october 2018.'
Configure Mikrotik to send IPFIX info
I use a GUI for my Mikrotik router, and the configuration for Traffic Flow can be found in the IP > Traffic Flow section. Here’s what I did:
Enabled: checked
Interfaces: WAN
Cache Entries: 128k (default value)
Active Flow Timeout: 00:30:00 (default value)
Inactive Flow Timeout: 00:00:15 (default value).
Configure a Target as well. See photo. Make sure that the Source IP address is set to the router’s IP on the LAN otherwise nfacctd ignores the traffic. My nfacctd is configured to listen on port 2055, and my raspberry pi is 192.168.1.35.
Test nfacctd
Open two terminal windows to the machine running this service. In one terminal, execute
sudo nfacctd -f /etc/pmacct/nfacctd.conf
In the other terminal window, watch the syslog
sudo journalctl -f
You may need to filter or grep the logs if your system is noisy and has a lot of other traffic going to syslog.
You’re looking for log messages from nfacctd that say its purging cache. Here is a sample from my machine.
Jun 30 16:06:02 vortex nfacctd[1954]: INFO ( out/mysql ): *** Purging cache - END (PID: 1954, QN: 348/348, ET: 1) ***
Jun 30 16:08:01 vortex nfacctd[1961]: INFO ( out/mysql ): *** Purging cache - START (PID: 1961) ***
Jun 30 16:08:01 vortex nfacctd[1962]: INFO ( in/mysql ): *** Purging cache - START (PID: 1962) ***
Jun 30 16:08:01 vortex nfacctd[1962]: INFO ( in/mysql ): *** Purging cache - END (PID: 1962, QN: 102/102, ET: 0) ***
Jun 30 16:08:01 vortex nfacctd[1961]: INFO ( out/mysql ): *** Purging cache - END (PID: 1961, QN: 363/363, ET: 0) ***
This happens every 2 minutes (120 seconds) from my configuration, you can set an earlier, or later time if desired. A shorter time means a mysql query is executed more often, a longer duration means that there is more data at risk of loss if the system is interrupted before the data can be committed to disk. Again, this is not valuable data, in a home use case, so there is no need to hammer the disk. I’ve chosen 2 minutes simply because the quick start guide for pmacct used 2 minutes.
There should also be some tables created for ‘inbound_MMYYYY’ and ‘outbound_MMYYYY’ by now with some data in it.
Automatically Start nfacctd on Boot
Since we have mostly stayed within the default system configuration files for pmacct, it is very easy to enable the pre-configured Systemd service to launch the daemon at system startup:
sudo systemctl enable nfacctd.service
That’s it, you now have traffic information being sent to your raspberry pi, getting aggregated and stored in a mysql database.
Stay tuned
Next on the agenda is to come up with a system to allow you to visualize how much data each host on your network is consuming per day, week, month or year.
To give you a hint of the kinds of things that might need doing if you’re reading this now and need this solved before I can get around to documenting my DIY solution, you can find out hos much data has been used since the start of the current month by running a query such as:
TinyMCE is a nice wysywig editor, and in my experience, is more performant with large, rich text content than Quill, which is the default editor used by the Primevue framework.
If you want to use TinyMCE with your VueJS 3 project, unfortunately, the documentation is not very great about how to do this. Here is what worked for me (using the composition API).
Install Dependencies
It is important to install tinyMCE and tinyMCE-vue exactly as follows:
After it is installed, then you need to load TinyMCE and TinyMCE-vue in your component in a specific order, otherwise it will load the cloud version, which requires a License key.
If you have the means to support the project, please do so, but it is a little annoying that it is difficult to use the GPL version of the library without inadvertently loading the cloud version.
<scriptsetup>//import the usual components you're using, including Vue//... then import the tinymce bits like so:import tinymce from"tinymce";import"tinymce/icons/default/icons.min.js";import"tinymce/themes/silver/theme.min.js";import"tinymce/models/dom/model.min.js";import"tinymce/skins/ui/oxide/skin.js";import"tinymce/skins/ui/oxide/content.js";import"tinymce/skins/content/default/content.js";import"tinymce/skins/ui/oxide/content.js";import Editor from"@tinymce/tinymce-vue";</script><template><Editorv-model:visible="modalContent":init="{promotion: false, branding: false, license_key: 'gpl', height: '400px', skin: 'oxide', skin_url: 'default' }" ></Editor></template>
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