Your Roku is Spying On You

Personally, I just assumed that was taking place as part of the service trying to improve itself.

Yes indeed...my default mode is to expect any voice service to have 'many ears'...humans listening to audio that's 'outside of their mission parameters'.

A friend asked me if they should get an Alexa or Google home device. I told them that was like asking if I prefer the NSA or the KGB.

Heh good one...I like it...
 
How are you liking Untangle now that you've been running it for some time?
I like it a lot. the UI is somewhat pedestrian and once you get used to the traffic flow it gets easier to track down problems. For instance, say you have an app or a service getting blocked... it could be NAT or your port forwarding rules, the Firewall, the Ad Blocker, Application Control, SSL Inspector, or the Web Filter. That's a lot to take in.

But it's done everything I needed, which I cannot say for Sophos UTM or pfSense or OPNsense. The only bummer, and this has nothing to do with Untangle per se, is that SSL packet inspection is becoming more useless every day. As more and more apps and services start verifying certificates internally, the exceptions needed "to keep things running" just isn't worth it at times.

Performance-wise, I'm running it on an old Dell box: Intel PentiumD 2.80GHz, w/3GB RAM, 120GB SSD, and dual Gbit NICs. Memory usage is steady at 50-60% and the CPU is rarely breathing heavy at all.

My only real concern is speed sometimes but I'm not sure if it's Untangle, the destination sites, Comcast, or GoogleDNS resolution or... ? Sometimes I'm hitting a site that's super slow, or it takes a while to resolve, then I run a SpeedTest and it's ripping at 175 Mbps. I feel like Comcast is prioritizing speedtest.net so people get good speed results while throttling other traffic, but I have no data to back that claim up.

I just switched over to CloudFlare (1.1.1.1) for DNS so we'll see how that goes. AT&T ran fiber in my neighborhood in the fall so I'm gonna give that a whirl when they turn it up.
 
I like it a lot. the UI is somewhat pedestrian and once you get used to the traffic flow it gets easier to track down problems. For instance, say you have an app or a service getting blocked... it could be NAT or your port forwarding rules, the Firewall, the Ad Blocker, Application Control, SSL Inspector, or the Web Filter. That's a lot to take in.

Definitely; with these type of devices/services the packet flowchart is...formidable. So many placed things can get stuck/blocked, etc...

I'm very comfortable with all of that as I've been administering some pretty high end security/proxy/filtering etc. devices for many years. I find the latest NGFW tech is so very much easier to deal with all of that...now is a good time to get into it as the learning curve, while still imposing, is considerably lessened.

Cool...thanks for the update. Seems you've gotten your head around it pretty good. The online demo looked promising; I played with it for a while....
 
Hey guys, seems like, after not so long the Raspberry Pi 3 is starting to fail. Need to reboot it every day now. Maybe it's the warm climate here, dunno.

So I'm just wondering if there is an alternative to the Pi 3 (i.e. less overheating issues) I can just transfer my microSD card into and continue running it as before without having to basically start from scratch? Cheers!
 
Never mind. just got the PI 4 with a heatsink case.

Nice!!! I've been looking at Pi 4 kits and am going to order one soon. Have no real plans for it aside from just playing with it and experimenting with LoraWAN IoT devices with the Pi as the server.

Have you noticed a big jump in performance vs the 3, and did you get the 8Gb version?
 
I haven't got it yet, got the 4GB.

I was considering something more powerful / bang for buck but then decided that I can't really afford the time to tinker around. I believe I can just take the MicroSD from the PI 3, shove it into the PI 4 and forget about it.
 
I assumed the problem was with the Pi because it runs quite hot much of the time. If the SD card fails, why does a quick reboot temporarily fix it?
 
I've got a 3 in a case as a pi-hole that's been really solid, but my RPi4 I couldn't leave in the case. It would crash with heat related issues frequently. I got it pretty early on though, but depending on you're doing with it, I don't think I'd put one in a case without a small fan. Really defeats a lot of the reason to buy one though for me. I tried using it as a media player as well, and it is pretty disappointing. No HDR support, and couldn't handle 4k content without video glitches.

I have the 4 running Home Assistant right now, but it's not really doing anything. All the devices it's supposed to be monitoring/controlling drop offline on it all the time, so it's essentially worthless.
 
Back
Top Bottom