The handful of you who know me personally, probably know that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. To me it is the last vestige of celebration rooted around being reflective and ultimately being thankful for everything that we do have. This year though it is really hard to find things to be thankful for. The world seems like it is coming apart at the seams. In particular the tech world seems to be awash in an ever growing sea of insanity. So with that in mind I want to publicly declare that this year I am primarily thankful for my brain.
God knows I’m abusing it in ways that I would’ve never dreamed of ten years ago. Yet it takes it. It still shows up for work every morning and guides me through the minefield that is my professional existence. Sometimes it has to drag me kicking and screaming through it. But regardless of how dire the circumstances seem to be, my brain finds a way to get the job done. I am so thankful for that.
As our notions of community and collective benefit have been slowly eroded over the years, a lot of us have taken to becoming insanely self-reliant for a lot of things. What’s interesting for me is that on the aggregate, I’m less self reliant in a tech sense now than I was a few years ago. For instance back in late 2021 I dumped my proprietary Unifi EdgeRouter for a custom built router based on an ODroid H2+ SBC and a NetCard expansion that ran OPNSense. That stunningly stable and reliable setup has continued to serve as my router up until this week.
So what happened? Well at some point I wanted to upgrade. Mostly because as things in the outside world get worse, my thought processes have increased become focused on trying to hedge my bets by making sure that if something breaks, I can either fix it with parts I have on hand or outright replace it with a backup that I have on hand. As the economy continues to worsen, tariff chaos continues and things like DRAM price explosions are beginning to rock all of tech (fuck you very much for this one in particular Sam Altman), this is becoming a growing concern of mine.
So if that router broke, could I fix it? Well probably. I have an older ODroid H2 board on hand that would likely allow me to limp along in a pinch. I have a backup net card expansion too along with an extra SATA drive. So in theory yes. But the older this hardware gets, the more itchy I get. Just to be clear: These ODroid H2 boards aren’t being made anymore. They were discontinued as their development and support were an early causality of COVID because the software licensing for the software required to compile new versions of the BIOS / Firmware cost more than they were making from the product at the time.
So I went ahead and placed an order for the equivalent ODroid H4+ along with everything I needed to make it work (except the SATA drive as I already had an extra one of those). This put me about $450 in the hole. But I didn’t care. I was excited. My OPNSense box was one of my favorite pieces of hardware because it just freaking worked and upgrades had been smooth and effortless.
So a few days I got the hardware and proceeded to assemble the unit. That went well enough. I then exported my configuration off of the old box. I then booted the new box into the OPNSense installer and started plugging and unplugging an ethernet cable into various network ports so I could determine which physical interfaces mapped to the device names in OPNSense / FreeBSD. I then made a copy of the exported configuration file and by hand modified the interface mapping to match up with the new interface names on the new box.
Everything was going great. This was amazing. Then I installed OPNSense on the new box and imported the new config. It worked like a charm. I then powered it down, unplugged everything from the old box and then plugged everything back into the new box. I then booted it up. It worked like a charm! Everything was back online and traffic was being routed. I logged into the Web UI and noticed that my additional plugins weren’t installed, so I went to install them.
This is when everything started to go to shit. In order to install plugins, I had to upgrade to the latest minor release of the 25.7 OPNSense software. Okay great. I hit the upgrade button and watched it download and start to install. And then… my dreams of having a brand new custom router imploded in front of my face. Which is to say that the box threw a kernel exception and rebooted itself. Which is to say that the entire installation was corrupted because this happened during a system upgrade. Which is to say: I was fucked.
So I tried adjusting various bios settings. I turned off power management (aka ASPM) for the PCI lanes attached to the onboard and expansion NICs. I turned off the performance cores on the box. I turned off various other things. No dice. Each and every time I tried again I was met with essentially the same exact failure. There was no fix to be found here.
I went through this process eight separate times. Each time I grew more agitated and pissed off. I was not a happy camper. At some point the following thought hit me like a bag full of bricks:
WHY IN THE FUCK AM I DOING THIS?
Well as it turns out, this was a really good question. It’s a shame that I didn’t ask this before. The answer of course is complicated and wait… no its not. I was doing it because its a continuation of what I was already doing. As I pondered the circumstances more, I realized that I didn’t NEED to do this.
Back in 2021 I was doing IT work for various clients and during COVID I didn’t want to physically go to these clients unless I absolutely needed to do so. So I had setup my OPNSense box and had it configured with site-to-site VPNs for these clients (which is something that I was doing with my old EdgeRouter). That way I could instantly access their server or remote control client machines from any machine in my house when they needed something. Back then, this made supporting them easy.
Of course I don’t do IT work anymore. I don’t need site-to-site VPNs. I don’t even need to map any ports because I don’t host any services anymore. Ever since I started using Tailscale, my routing needs got way more simple. The most advanced thing I need nowadays is the ability to fail over from one Internet connection to another as I pay for both a fiber connection and a backup wireless 5g connection.
So yeah. I didn’t need to do this. So instead of finding new and innovative ways to bang my head against the wall, I did something young ITF wouldn’t have done: I kicked off the RMA / Return process. Then I ordered a new much cheaper Ubiquiti Dream Router 7 (should match rather nicely with all of the Ubiquiti Wireless APs I have) which costs a hair over about half as much.
It’s not all roses and sunshine here of course. I’m regressing from a largely open source solution to a more proprietary one and that has its downsides, doubly so in the age of enshittification. But you know what? My time is worth more than this and wasting it on pursuing this any further was going to be pure idiocy. I just need something that works and I need to have a backup in case the new thing fails. They don’t have to be the same thing, they just need to be functionally equivalent.
As I’ve gotten older, its definitely gotten a bit slower but its also gotten more effective. It can ask the truly important questions much sooner now. 10 years ago I wouldn’t have given up. I might’ve exchanged that hardware for more hardware under the assumption I had gotten a lemon (for the record, I do believe this). I might have even decided to give OpenWRT a shot in lieu of OPNSense in the vain hope that Linux would’ve worked better than FreeBSD. I would’ve spent way more time on this. I would’ve “won”.
But would it have been worth it even if, by the time I reached the bitter end, I was ultimately successful? By my estimation today, absolutely not.
In any event, the point of sharing this tale is to share with you my primary realization which is that sometimes continuing to do something just because its what you have been doing, may not in fact be the most sensible option. But once you get locked into a way of doing things, it really can be hard to break away.
So with this story in mind, I am thankful for my brain. I’m also thankful for my wife, my family, my friends and my cats. They bring a lot of joy to my life that I might not otherwise be able to find and ultimately that’s what makes dumb-assing my way through the maze I call life a rewarding experience.