In the wide world of interwebs, there’s a lot of dangerous exploits, vulnerabilities and attacks that can happen regularly. With this also comes a vast number of trackers both online and built into Windows 10 itself. I’ve been looking for a new firewall program for sometime and did a free trial of Glasswire for 14 days a couple months ago. I enjoyed the application but couldn’t justify the cost (30/year at the time) for this app and decided to shop around for something potentially cheaper/better.

I ran into an application called NetLimiter. It was hailed as a cheaper replacement to Glasswire (specifically: a one time charge for the lifetime of the product with free updates for the current release). I tested this and was a bit disappointed with the interface and options. It’s a gorgeous GUI and tool, but didn’t quite have what I wanted. Back to Glasswire I went!

” A black hole for Internet advertisements”. I’ll vouch. The amount of DNS blocks I’ve seen and how much snappier everything loads and runs has been an amazing improvement. PiHole is a software primary built for a Raspberry Pi 3 (or 2 I believe) and blocks known DNS entries of advertisers and trackers. It was a quick project to implement and has been working like a charm since.

Whelp, as with anything IT, things change and don’t always work properly. It’s both a blessing and a curse to always be busy when it comes time for upgrades and maintenance. Let’s begin.

Another month, another set up changes to the network. These ones were a little more trying versus the gaming rig upgrade, however. Bit of downtime, some minor data loss, and some CPU upgrade issues. More experience, has I.

I’ve been using pfSense for several years now as a firewall/router for my home network. It’s always been reliable and has plenty of features I love tinkering with (VPN, internal DNS, domains, etc). It’s always been reliable until now, at least.

With 2019 comes a new year and a new rig! I upgrade to a 1070 SC card recently and realized my second gen Xeon Sandy Bridge wasn’t cutting it (3.3GHz quad core, e3-1245). I was only using about 20-40% of the GPU under the heaviest load so the CPU was a massive bottleneck. It went downhill from there.