Networking in the House

Let me just start by saying that I do not need any of this, it is more-or-less just because I can, and want to. Internet We have a gigabit fibre connection running into our house. I’d love to have multiple WAN for failover, but frankly, it’s not worth it, as we have high enough uptime with our current ISP alone. Internal network From there, it heads into our ISP modem, then ISP router, and then straight into our main 8-port switch. This, then connects to out PoE switch, which powers our two Unifi U7 Pro access points (that’s what the Unifi Controller is for). There are also 3 cables that then come out of the 8-port switch. Two for the Raspberry Pis, and one for my laptop. This allows all the server nodes to have the fastest possible internet connection they can have. ...

May 24, 2025 · 3 min · 590 words · Vivaan M

Google I/O 2025

I’m quite the tech enthusiast, especially when it comes to Google (I really really want to work there in the future). I know it’s a bit late but there was a lot to unpack, so here’s my take on Google I/O 2025. I/O 2025 was all about AI. The event did literally start with an AI generated video, showcasing their new model’s (Veo 3) capabilities. It was a bit rough, but pretty good for AI. ...

May 23, 2025 · 4 min · 679 words · Vivaan M

What Is Init0?

This will be a short one. For those who didn’t know, init 0 is essentially another way to shutdown a unix-based system, by changing the init run level to 0, essentially shutting down the system in a controlled manner. I chose it because its a reference to Unix (and Linux), and I spend a lot of time interacting with Linux. That doesn’t mean I won’t post anything about what I do on my Windows PC - this blog is supposed to be a digital notepad of all things techy, and so it won’t be limited to just that. ...

May 22, 2025 · 1 min · 98 words · Vivaan M

Server Authentication in the lab

Why? One of the central aspects of my setup is the LLDAP server. This allows all services to authenticate using the same credentials, meaning users just need to remember one set of logins. One thing I wanted to do was to ensure the servers also authenticated against the same server. Let’s get started I initially started off by following the guide on the LLDAP repository to setup NSLCD in combination with LLDAP, however I soon found the NSLCD was no longer actively supported. This meant that it was quite lacking in the feature space, and often had weird compatibility issues. ...

May 21, 2025 · 5 min · 1025 words · Vivaan M

Introduction to the lab

Nodes Let’s take a look into what the ‘(home)lab’ (that’s quite a generous word) consists of… 1 Raspberry Pi 5 1 Raspberry Pi 3 2 Oracle cloud free-tier VMs My other laptop, which adds some power to the ‘cluster’ when I’m not using it So in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that powerful. But that also adds to the challenge, as things might need some tweaking to get working. Of course, this comes with the caveat of wanting to drop-kick my laptop out of the windows when things don’t work, but it’s all part of the fun…, right? ...

May 21, 2025 · 3 min · 528 words · Vivaan M

Welcome

Welcome to Init0 02:48:38 vivaan@ultimate ~ → man init0 Hey! Welcome to Init0, my digital notepad for all things techy, where I share whatever I happen to be working on at the moment. Init0 is a place for anything, from Home Automation, to my programming endeavours, to me trying to self-host half of Google. Whether you’re here to learn something new, see what I’ve been building, or just take a peek into my workflow — I’m glad you stopped by. ...

May 20, 2025 · 1 min · 117 words · Vivaan M