21 november 2020
so today a network card I had ordered arrived, delayed 2 days. I put it in a nice old intel atom pc I had unused, which can run fanless and had a PCI (not express) slot, installed pfsense on it to create a firewall.
We have a server from work at home, which is used for backups. Having this server on the same network as the rest of the home devices didn't feel right, so I took the new firewall and put it in front of it, with a couple port forwards, and also updated the server to the ubuntu stable release, 20.04.
Problem came when a few minutes later it stopped working. The NIC was faulty? bad cable? ghosts? Nope. Turns out that because the server actually runs X11 and gnome, it was deciding to enter sleep after 20 minutes of inactivity.
I feel tired.